child actors

My son, Christopher Paris, would have been a wonderful child actor. It wasnt meant to be. But this haunts me still - not knowing what might have been. Enjoy.

The New York Times
June 4, 2006
Hollywood Elementary
By ADRIAN NICOLE LeBLANC

Nine-year-old Jaysha Patel doesn't cry easily, but on a recent morning, she was ready to weep. She took a chair facing her fellow actors in a bland conference room. The mothers, who sat in the back, seemed oblivious: one knitted; another placed stamps on a pile of picture postcards of her son, which would alert casting directors to the air date of his latest show. Meanwhile, Trisha Simmons, the children's very pretty teacher, offered her aspiring students a couple of tips: "Short breaths help you to cry. Tightening the throat helps." Simmons looked resplendent in a bright purple hooded jacket and a rhinestone belt, circulating among her charges, some as young as 5. "Take your finger out of your nose," she chided one, then stopped to squint at a boy. "What's that on your lips?" she asked.

"Powdered doughnut," he admitted.

The workshop, Crying on Cue, was taking place at the Oakwood Toluca Hills, a vast complex of temporary rental apartments in Los Angeles that caters to families actively pursuing a Hollywood career. In addition to housing, the Oakwood offers the Child Actor Program, which brings industry professionals, like Simmons, onto the premises and has made the Oakwood a much-sought-after residence for aspiring child actors. Simmons and others teach specialized, marketable skills: "If you're a kid, and you can cry, you're going to have a long road ahead of you — lots of work," Simmons says. She's a working actor whose résumé includes roles in "Desperate Housewives" and "Will and Grace."

On this Sunday morning, Jaysha was feeling pretty confident; the previous day she managed the tears all by herself, though it took preparation. First she tried imagining her dad dead. Then her mother. "She tried the dog," her father, Jay, told me. "That didn't work. It had to be the both of us." Jaysha pretended her parents had been stabbed.

Simmons kneeled in front of Jaysha and asked her to tell a sad story. Sitting on the chair, Jaysha pouted and began: she wanted a dog and her father said no because a dog meant responsibility. Then they got a dog. Her father, who owns a liquor store, named the puppy Smirnoff. "But he peed on the carpet, and bit my mom's toe," Jaysha continued, tucking her chin into her chest for effect. Then her father sold Smirnoff because he was too hard to train.

"How did it feel?" Simmons asked softly.

"Bad," Jaysha said, mumbling. The children watched her quietly. Jaysha's eyes welled with tears. Simmons clapped. The children clapped. Jaysha drew it out for a moment longer, then lifted her head and smiled.

"What an incredible accomplishment!" Simmons said, grinning. "No menthol, no eye drops, no onions! Just natural. That's beautiful." Authentic tears are always best, Simmons advises, but auditions sometimes require an aid. If they choose to use, say, a tissue with chopped onions, she reminds her students to be sure not to throw it away in the audition room.

While Jaysha listened to her classmates' sorry tales of road-killed squirrels and longed-for fathers, Jay waited in the busy lobby of the Oakwood's North Clubhouse, the hub of program activity. Stylish children talked on cellphones; others read on the couches in a waiting area across from the front desk, where well-trained Oakwood staff members provide residents with hotel-like amenities. The fitness room, where there is a personal trainer available, overlooks landscaped paths leading down to the resort-quality pool or up to the tennis courts.

Each year, between mid-January and May, when some 100-odd pilots are being cast, one-quarter of the Oakwood's 1,151 furnished units are filled by families of child actors. "Home to the Famous, and Almost Famous," a billboard at the front gate reads. Located near Burbank, it's conveniently close to most of the major studios. The Oakwood's orientation for "newbies," the first-timers who make up about 80 percent of the families staying there each year, is also a draw: lectures about the entertainment business; connections to people like Simmons, who give complimentary classes to enlist new students; a show-biz-kid expo that displays all the tertiary industries: diction tapes, head shot photography and packaging, marketing-strategy DVD's. On-site tutoring — unaccredited, held weekday mornings in the conference room — can be paid for weekly to allow children to come and go, given their unpredictable work schedules. Units at the Oakwood start at $2,000 a month for a studio with a Murphy bed.

Jennifer Love Hewitt lived in the Oakwood for several years. Frankie Muniz from "Malcolm in the Middle" lived there for about four pilot seasons. Many of the kids and parents at the Oakwood will tell you that Hilary Duff lived in an apartment for seven years (it was really about two and a half), which serves as an inspirational tale of an alum who stayed with it and succeeded. In the past, parents rarely came out for pilot season without a basic understanding of how the business worked. These days, casting directors and agents say, they are seeing increasing numbers of novice families who are committing to the four-month pilot season. Some industry people attribute the flood of green arrivals to their exposure to behind-the-scenes TV programs, star biopics, celebrity news shows and teenage entertainment magazines, which give the untutored a sense of confidence about the way show business works. "With 'American Idol' and the Internet, everyone thinks they are savvy about what's going on," one manager, Jillian Neal, told me. "There used to be a much bigger divide between the real world and Hollywood." Oakwood's well-promoted Child Actor Program implicitly encourages the assumption that there is a formula to making it big.

Very few parents I met during the four weeks I lived at the Oakwood in January and February seemed motivated by the money that their children could earn (the rare $100,000 for a nationally broadcast commercial or, if a child landed a role on a pilot, anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000, depending on the significance of the role, whether it was network or cable and the child's past credits). But plenty of them, much like overanxious parents who are determined to get their child into an Ivy League university, seem to believe that endless classes and coaching sessions will guarantee their children's success. Simmons, who worked with Hilary and Haylie Duff, says: "There are more parents coming today who say, 'Can I pay you to get my kid a part?' I tell them: 'That's not what I do. I coach, and he goes out and gets the part."'

Anne Henry, a co-founder of BizParentz Foundation, a nonprofit group that provides information to families of acting kids, says that the increasing numbers of families who uproot their lives to come to Los Angeles reflects societal pressure. "Parents think they owe their child the opportunity to pursue their dream." And for many parents, that means devoting themselves to turning their child's aspirations into an A-list Hollywood career.

Mothers tend to dominate among those who come with their children to the Oakwood. Jay Patel, who is 36, is the odd father among them, but like his female peers, he had no idea it could be so hard. His daughter, Jaysha, was special: she excelled at every opportunity he'd provided in the vicinity of their hometown, Bradenton, Fla. — Indian folk dancing, soccer, swimming, karate. The problem was, she loved it all. He wanted her to focus on one thing so that she could start the professional climb while she was young. An immigrant from Zambia, Jay had dropped out of school and had no backup plan when his promising cricket career didn't materialize, which was how he ended up running a liquor store with his wife. A believer in education with a purpose, he bought Jaysha an $8,900 lifetime membership to John Robert Powers, a modeling and talent school, which offered classes and placed Jaysha on a regional circuit, then a national one. Twice — at a total cost of more than $10,000 — father and daughter flew to California for talent conventions, including the International Modeling and Talent Association (I.M.T.A.) gathering, one of the biggest in the country.

Encouraged by their local talent schools, kids from all over come — and pay hefty registration fees — to participate in I.M.T.A. professional workshops and gain exposure to the industry. The I.M.T.A. also serves as a feeder for agents and managers, whose jobs are made easier by having so many talented kids assembled in one place. Many of the judges moonlight as teachers and private coaches. Jay was stunned by the number of gifted kids, but he says he believes that Jaysha, as an Indian, has the advantage of standing out.

At the I.M.T.A., Jaysha took workshops in modeling, acting, swimsuit competition and monologues. She enjoyed everything except modeling, because you have to be so skinny. "I gotta have food," she says. After another convention, Jay came home with a few business cards from managers who said they felt Jaysha showed promise.

People he spoke to advised him to move to Los Angeles for pilot season if he wanted to take her career to the next level. Soon after, Jay announced to his wife that he wanted to sell everything and go. "Ever since 9/11, I changed," he told me. "You've got to live." His wife said she thought he was nuts, but eventually they agreed that he and Jaysha could go to Hollywood for six months and that she would stay home and manage their store.

Marie Barnes, who is 14, was the one who persuaded her parents to take her to Hollywood. She was 10 when she begged her mother, Lori, to let her attend a local scouting competition advertised on the radio. About 400 kids taped a cold reading of a commercial, and Marie was 1 of 16 chosen to go on to a talent convention sponsored by the Millie Lewis Actors, Models and Talent Competition (A.M.T.C.) in Florida. There she got an agent who lived in Nashville and who told Lori that Marie needed to be taking professional acting classes there. Lori agreed to drive Marie three hours each way, sometimes twice a week if she had an audition, from their home in Evansville, Ind., occasionally taking along a friend to help keep her awake.

It paid off. At her next Millie Lewis A.M.T.C. in 2004, Marie won runner-up in the Best Child Actor category among about 800 contenders. Lori learned of the Oakwood at a seminar, and they stayed there last summer so that Marie could attend an acting camp and find a West Coast agent. They came again in January for their first pilot season.

Lori, an perky Midwestern woman, still seems a bit amazed that her mornings start in a small one-bedroom apartment instead of in her spacious house, where she has left behind her husband, Bob, and 16-year-old son. Although she and Bob are committed to supporting their hard-working daughter in whatever way they can, they're somewhat mystified at her direction. "Why she chose acting, I have no idea," says Marie's father, a family doctor. "It would not be her mother's goal for her or mine. Passion is an overused word, but it is a passion for her." Marie's responsibility was to keep up her grades. She had been told that she was a Disney type — she was fresh-faced and her acting was slightly over the top. Marie does miss her father and her dog, and sometimes she misses her brother, but she finds Hollywood thrilling and the company of other professional children a relief. She's not considered odd for analyzing commercials or noticing the gestures of physical comedy of supporting actors on Disney shows. At the Oakwood, everyone understands the difficulty of getting call backs from auditions, whereas at home, given her reputation as the local girl with big talent, the fact that she is not yet a movie star is hard to explain.

Lori finds Hollywood baffling. While she's now able to survive the freeways, she's still trying to navigate the etiquette of the place — businesspeople who hate small talk; phone calls that go unreturned; casting directors who refuse to shake children's hands because of germs. Then there are the cliques at the Oakwood, and the gossip, and the mothers who lie about their kids' representation and inflate the nature of their bookings, and the children who don't seem as if they even enjoy what they are there to do.

There are ethical considerations too. Recently Lori submitted Marie for an audition for a Church of Scientology public-service announcement that she found on Breakdown Services, a Web site listing casting calls. The Barnes are practicing Catholics, and when Marie was called in for the audition, Lori spent hours on the Internet trying to learn about the beliefs of Scientologists. She also had long conversations with her husband, who didn't want Marie involved. Once again, Marie lobbied for her cause: "I'm an actor, you have to do stuff you don't believe in," she said. Some kids would have turned up their noses at a P.S.A. — some refused to audition for any commercials — but Marie was open to everything. She craved experience.

Lori hated to disappoint her. Her daughter was thoroughly committed to her acting classes and kept up her grades in a program arranged through her middle school. They'd been spending most of their time waiting for her agent to call. Lori couldn't deny that it would be nice to have something to break the boredom.

Most of the time, Marie and Lori were under a kind of house arrest. Agent-submitted auditions could come suddenly and required preparation, so Marie and Lori usually didn't make plans. Many mornings, they would hike the Oakwood grounds for exercise. The dim traffic hum of the 101 trailed them — up the curving drives, speed bump after speed bump, past the indistinguishable alphabetized white buildings. Back at apartment

N-108, Marie would tackle her three hours of schoolwork, and then she and Lori would fill the remaining hours with scrap-booking, knitting and watching too much TV.

It got too quiet — no barking dogs, no brother playing his drums. They spent too much time together. The last time they stayed at the Oakwood, they were on the third floor and could escape to the small balcony that overlooked Burbank, but now there was no reprieve: they'd been assigned to a unit on the ground floor facing an interior walkway, which was next door to the collection point for the building's garbage chute. At night, if there was nothing appealing on TV, they went to sleep early to avoid eating junk food and listened to the bottles breaking as neighbors tossed down their trash. "You're lying in bed thinking, I didn't get calls," Lori says. "You know you shouldn't think that way, but you do."

Marie adds, "But when you wake up, tomorrow's a new day." She seems certain that her break will come. "We go walking, and my mom puts her arm around me."

Marie has received positive feedback each step of the way, which makes the question of her ultimate success seem less like an issue of talent than of persistence. And she has been recognized for her special skills — like her black belt in karate. In an audition, she demonstrated different karate positions while holding a huge Slurpee of Frawg energy drink.

When Marie hangs out with her friends and Lori has some solitude, she and Bob, who talk at least twice a day on the phone, speak more freely about the future. "We talk about if we can afford this or not," Lori says. "We're trying to make her dream come true, but it takes time."

Agents and managers I talked to say they prefer families with no financial limits as well as the commitment of one parent to treat the child's career as a full-time job. Good stage mothers need to follow through on instructions, be pleasant and professional and, despite the L.A. traffic, always, always, deliver the talent to wherever they need to be on time. (A veteran's car is stocked for the sudden audition or call back: snacks, water, head shots, demo reels, hair products and several sets of clothes.)

If the child's career begins gaining traction, it is ideal if the whole family can relocate to Los Angeles or if the absent parent can visit regularly to reduce the distractions of separation, which effectively means maintaining two homes and having a flexible job. An only child is preferable because the actor doesn't miss siblings and the mother isn't overstretched.

Rhondelle Liberato, a 49-year-old former real estate agent from Galveston, Tex., and her 10-year-old daughter, Liana, were a good match for those looking to take on new clients. And last year during her first pilot season, Liana had the kind of luck everyone told newbies never to expect: within days of arriving, the blond, blue-eyed Liana had her first audition. By the end of the season, she had landed four significant jobs in TV dramas, including "Cold Case" and "C.S.I.: Miami."

Liana has an instinct for acting and a face that gains resonance on film. "She's very still naturally," and stillness is an asset for film, says Simmons, who coaches her privately. And there's Liana's confidence: during an audition for a pilot as the actor Jane Leeves's daughter, the product of a sperm donor, Liana — unscripted — cleverly mimicked Leeves behind her back, making the director and producers laugh.

Rhondelle recalls that when she was pregnant with Liana, she'd go to the theater and watch movies back to back. She has always been curious about the making of films and the lives of movie stars. When Liana, at age 3, started doing community musical theater, a passion she shares with her father, George, Rhondelle marveled at her daughter's fearlessness onstage, as if she had sprung from somewhere else. She wanted Liana to sustain that boldness. "It's intimidating for me to see child actors," Rhondelle says. "How do they do that? It's not my nature. I didn't want to hold her back. I didn't want to be a mom with regrets."

After Liana completed a professional, 26-show run in "Galveston, the Musical," when she was 7, her parents signed her up for a local acting camp. When it was canceled, Rhondelle found another one in Los Angeles. By the time she was 9, she and Rhondelle were living at the Oakwood. Because they made the leap, she wants Liana to give it 100 percent. "I'm not here to twiddle my thumbs," Rhondelle says. Liana's style is more laid-back; her competitiveness comes out only at auditions, and if she's stressed, she keeps it to herself. "My mom wants me to work really hard," Liana told me. "Sometimes, I'm in the mood to just hang out. I want to read the script one or two times. She wants me to read it five or six times." (Although Liana's usually happy to read it 10 times if it involves animals.) Liana says she wishes that her mother would stop worrying about everything and relax and have some fun, the way they do when her dad comes to visit and they do things like hike behind the Hollywood sign.

Shortly after Liana's promising start last year, her father, who'd had surgery for prostate cancer, discovered he needed radiation therapy, and Rhondelle and Liana returned to Galveston. After he completed his treatment, Liana's manager, Laura Walsh (who also represents Jaysha), urged them to come back, and they did. Rhondelle and Liana have been living in a two-bedroom apartment at the Oakwood since January.

Rhondelle keeps in close contact with Walsh, who has a master plan: "We're not going the Disney Nickelodeon route," she told me. "I want Liana to be able to transform into a strong adult actress. Dakota Fanning,

AnnaSophia Robb, when their rates climb too high, they'll be looking for the next one."

Despite Rhondelle's tireless effort — new head shots, hand-signed postcards with Liana's picture, researching scripts in development looking for potential roles, chauffeuring Liana to coaching and acting classes — it's been hard to retrieve the early momentum. Liana was still going up for roles — she had an important audition coming up for the lead in a movie called "Magic," about a dog who talks — but she hadn't yet gotten work. In the meantime, Rhondelle was spending a small fortune for the private coaching with Simmons, who says that Liana is already capable of acting with her as a peer.

In addition to training, Simmons encourages parents to work to boost their children's visibility. Simmons suggested that Liana take part in one of her marketing ploys — hand-delivering gift baskets to casting directors at the studios. Simmons prepares the baskets, sometimes with muffins and Starbucks coffee. Each displays the participating student's head shots and résumé, and her own. "If I brought it in, they'd say, 'O.K., just leave it there,"' she told me, "but this cute little blond, blue-eyed kid?"

On Valentine's Day, Liana was sitting in the back seat of her mother's car signing cards for basket deliveries. "From Liana?" Liana asked.

"How about Love?" Rhondelle suggested. "Lovely Liana." Rhondelle had spent $75 on extra chocolates to add to the baskets because she thought they looked skimpy. Liana misspelled Valentine and started again.

Rhondelle says she wishes that Liana's career were past the point of having to do things like gift baskets, and even though it's not, she's still uncomfortable with the whole gift-basket thing. But she heard that Jaysha got an audition for "Haversham Hall," a new Disney series in production, because of a basket.

In the back seat, Liana took the cellphone and left a message for her Oakwood friend, Hannah Marks: "I've been kidnapped. I'm being held hostage. It will cost $10 to get me back." Hannah returned the call, to alert Liana of a Valentine's Day dance at the North Clubhouse that night.

"Liana—" Rhondelle said impatiently. Rhondelle was tired; she had stayed up all night worrying and talking with her husband; she was particularly concerned about driving Liana too hard for the "Magic" audition, but if Liana got this lead, Rhondelle said she thought it would jump-start things and the pressure wouldn't be so intense. "There's no question that she wants it, but I want to go the extra little bit."

Liana told Hannah to listen to her message and call her back. Hannah called back. It seemed as if the kidnapping had been resolved, because Liana was now a princess breaking in and out of an invented language. Then she squealed: " 'C.S.I.'? Which one, Miami or New York? I hope you get it! I'll see you tonight. Cool."

At the first basket drop at a studio, the assistant at the desk smiled at Liana. She'd clearly seen the cute girls with baskets before. The casting director, however, came out and accepted it awkwardly. At the next stop, the secretary told Liana to place her basket beside the other gift baskets on the casting director's desk, including several still unopened that said, "Happy 2006!"

Back in the car, Rhondelle was exasperated to hear about the other baskets. "Did you see her or her assistant?" she asked. They then went to a huge, noisy casting room filled with types — bunches of dolled-up babies in overalls and prairie dresses, lots of red-headed toddlers, blondes in pigtails. Parents studied head shots. One staff member accepted résumés from a line of lanky black men. Liana found her way to her next stop, a production company.

"Why?" a pretty assistant asked her when Liana handed her the gift.

"From my acting coach," Liana said. "From me."

"Isn't that sweet!" said the assistant. "Nice of you to come all the way down here." The assistant asked Liana a few quick questions about her credits and where she was from and sent her on her way. Then back in the car. The gift baskets had not come with driving directions, and it turned out that the next stop was in a neighborhood they had already been to, and Rhondelle now had to loop back across town. When they finally arrived, Liana waited for 15 minutes until a harried casting director stepped out, and an assistant behind a desk raised her eyebrows and gestured to Liana with her chin.

"Do I know you?" asked the casting director.

"No. This is for you."

"Why is this for me?"

Liana, as if she were auditioning, switched her approach: "Hi, I'm Liana and this is from my agent. I mean my acting coach." She hesitated. "And this is for you."

"This is for everyone in the agency?"

"Yeah," Liana said, rolling her feet.

"Oh," said the woman, relenting a little. "That's very sweet."

Out by the elevator, Liana said: "I didn't like that woman. She was freaky."

Back in the car, Rhondelle was irritated. "I'll tell you what, we're not doing this next year," she said. They were late for Liana's 90-minute coaching session, and the "Magic" audition was just days away. Liana said her stomach hurt. She had a headache and she was hungry. She lay down in the back seat. "Everything's wrong with me. I'm tired."

"Don't be tired," Rhondelle said.

Liana first spotted Hannah in the Oakwood fitness room. Hannah was working out with her mom, Nova. A slip of a girl, Hannah, who is 13, got tossed off a treadmill after turning up the speed too fast. But Liana would have noticed her anyway: she's delicate and tiny and intense.

It turned out that Hannah was also an actor. The mothers and daughters, who lived in the same building, became friendly. The women have a good deal in common: Hannah's father also survived cancer, making the family separations especially fraught. The men each run their own businesses: Liana's dad is a real estate broker and Hannah's owns a software company. The men visit often — Liana's dad comes every two weeks, while Hannah's, who owns a plane, flies in on the alternate weekends that Hannah and Nova don't go home to San Luis Obispo. Both mothers left very comfortable lives back home and both have been criticized for allowing their daughters to do certain types of work — Nova for letting Hannah play the daughter of a drug addict in a TV show and Rhondelle for allowing Liana to take a role in which her character's mother used her picture on the Internet to attract men.

While Hannah's career was further along than Liana's — Hannah had three feature films under her belt — both girls were auditioning regularly and had attentive managers. ("We didn't give up all this stuff and leave our husbands to have mediocre representation," Nova says.) This meant the families could be freer with each other because of the shared level of success.

The kids at the Oakwood are not nearly as competitive as the adults, but the more substantive the roles become, the more the pool narrows, which makes it very clear who one's opponents are. (Whenever Hannah went for a second or third call back, or to audition before the producers, she regularly encountered the same half-dozen girls). It helped their relationship that Liana and Hannah were different types and wouldn't often compete for roles: Liana was blond, athletic and youthful; Hannah was dark-haired, serious and mature.

But both girls resent it when adults make assumptions that acting is ruining their childhoods. "Acting is my passion, and I think that's being a kid," Liana says.

"Ditto," Hannah adds.

Their Hollywood experiences weave easily in and out of their conversations. One night in February, Hannah was sleeping over at Liana's. The girls assessed Liana's new head shots as if they were picking out the cutest boy in a teen magazine. Then they moved on to a game of hide-and-seek, after which Hannah authoritatively set up a bed of pillows on the floor. "Watch this," she said, as she stood up straight, then fell backward.

"Cool!" Liana said.

"It was a stunt I had to do in 'Doll Graveyard,"' Hannah said, referring to her very first movie, a low-budget horror flick. In one scene, she had to drop back into her grave, which was softened with a cushion. "But," she explained, "from the outside it looked like dirt."

Hannah's mother, Nova, a 48-year-old Los Angeles native and former actor, says she believes that Hannah, who has always loved performing, is well suited to the profession that she herself didn't have the focus for. "It takes tunnel vision," says Nova, who had an agent by the time she was 6. "Hannah has more talent and confidence." Nova played the fresh-faced all-American girl on TV. Hannah prefers dramatic roles in serious films. "Nova's all light and sunshine," says Jillian Neal, Hannah's manager and one of Nova's old acting friends. "Hannah's attracted to the dark side."

When Hannah was 10, she told her mother, "I want to have the opportunities you had." She'd been performing in community theater for four years by then. While Nova wanted to support Hannah in every way she could, she was concerned that the pressures of Hollywood would heighten Hannah's tendency to become easily stressed. Hannah had always been high-strung; as a child, she had trouble sleeping. She connected most deeply to stories about people in distress, and the poetry she wrote was often agonized. They'd left Los Angeles for San Luis Obispo in large part so Hannah could be raised at a slower pace. "For a girl who has all these privileges, she carries a lot of emotional pain," Nova says.

But acting was also a way for Hannah to express herself. "Hannah was never a great fit anyway," Nova says. In school, she'd never been the popular girl. She is self-conscious about her tiny size, but in Hollywood it was an asset. (Hannah could play younger characters.) Nova also knew, from her own years in the business, that Hannah possessed that hunger that was essential to making it in Hollywood. In 2005, they came to the Oakwood, intending to stay for just eight weeks; they've been there for more than a year. But Nova wants something different for Hannah. She eschews the usual Oakwood offerings. She does most of the coaching for auditions and enlists another actor to cultivate Hannah's craft.

For Hannah, days begin watching "Live With Regis and Kelly," either in her bed or on their white leather couch. After that, she and her mother home-school. Nova replaced the Oakwood's standard-issue furniture and mass-produced prints with her own things and painted a wall in the living room blue. One night a week, Nova selects a film for directorial or acting analysis — "Paper Moon," "My Life as a Dog," "A Patch of Blue." They like to play Scene It, a movie trivia game. They laugh a lot. Hannah, a precise child, makes intricate collages about fashion and celebrities. She spent her allowance on Mike Wallace's memoir and got halfway through a book by the comedian Lewis Black. "I don't think it's appropriate for my age," she says, but she was curious to learn more about his life because they have a scene together in one of her coming films. She makes a point of learning as much as she can from everyone on a set — she once asked a producer to explain the way a budget worked. Hannah enjoys hanging out with Liana but can find it exhausting. Liana likes to run around the Oakwood; one day Hannah came home and said, amazed, "She made me climb a tree!" Nova says she hopes that Liana's playfulness will relax Hannah. When Hannah's anxieties overwhelm her, which is not infrequently, Nova says, "We need a Liana fix."

Aidan Mitchell, another friend of Hannah's, shares her obsessive intensity. In his old life, Aidan, who is 12, was ostracized for the qualities that serve him well in Hollywood: his almost tender physical beauty, his exacting and self-imposed standards and his willingness to take great emotional risks. It is clear, from talking with his mother, Connie, that his childhood was extremely unhappy. He has Developmental Coordination Disorder, which made him the object of ridicule and bullying when he was growing up in Ireland, where his family moved from the U.S. when he was 3. But he fit in among adult actors.

Aidan performed in local productions at Galway's Town Hall Theater. When they moved to San Diego when Aidan was 10, he found the classes disappointing. "They weren't very good," he says. "The kids were there to have fun. They weren't there to learn anything." His mother, wanting him to be seen by the industry, took him to Los Angeles for a week of intensive pilot-season-preparation classes, and Aidan was well received. Still, his mother had to push him to return for the pilot season; he was afraid he wouldn't succeed. He was recently cast in a pilot, "Low Life," as Minnie Driver and Eddie Izzard's son. He has done two movies and will start work on a third, "Rodeo," a film in which he plays a child who is physically abused by his stepfather.

Connie says she finds managing her son's Hollywood business easy compared with the challenges of his earlier life. "At home, I spent my time banging my head against the school and the medical system," she says. "Now I'm able to spend my time in a positive way for him." Most stage mothers talk about trying to lower their children's optimism in order to protect them from inevitable rejection, but Connie is grateful that her son finally has hope. "Here, who he is is celebrated," she says. "In the past, mainstream society tried to change him into the child they thought he could be."

Aidan, Marie and Liana all take a popular improv class with the actors Glenn Withrow and his wife, Hallie Todd, who run In House Media, a full-service studio. In addition to offering a young actors' program, they also conduct screen tests and produce demo reels. (Todd, who played the mother of Hilary Duff in the hit Disney show "Lizzie McGuire," has recently finished a seven-book series called "Peace or War? A Primer for Stage Parents.")

One February afternoon, Glenn's energetic class cheered as he announced the setting for an acting exercise — a mental hospital. He whispered an affliction to each student: Marie suffered from a rhyming disorder, Liana a tic and Aidan an unquenchable need for love. Most of the kids interpreted their challenges predictably. Zombies shuffled, tongues lolled. Marie did her best to rhyme the gibberish her fellow patients were using. Liana, who was trying not to laugh at the antic madness that surrounded her, vigorously jerked her head to the left. Aidan banged into people with a desperate expression, like a boy who smacks the girl he likes.

"What's that?" a spiky-haired boy asked him.

"I haven't had gentle affection in a long time, and I need some," Aidan explained.

"What?" the boy asked.

Aidan repeated himself, mistakenly thinking that the boy didn't hear him, then realized the boy was still confused. "I want someone to be nice to me on a higher level than friends."

"Ewwww!" the boy said.

"I'm just doing Glenn's stupid objective," Aidan responded, placing the tips of his fingers in the pockets of his jeans.

"Would you do it naked?" another boy in an Evil Twin T-shirt asked.

"Well, yeah," Aidan said.

The Evil Twin whistled his disgust.

"It's acting," Aidan said, less confident. "You do what the scene requires."

For Jaysha, the auditions have slowly rolled in. She takes them in stride as she seems to take everything else: she rehearses, she tries, she fails, she moves along. She goes to Bollywood movies with her father. She eats ice cream at the Olive Garden, where the two have become regulars.

Jay, however, was a wreck. He'd begun to get migraines. He'd gained weight. He was drinking too much. His wife, whom he met through an arranged marriage, had become much more independent, and when she visited, she wasn't eager to reassume her traditional role. The early challenge of mastering the entertainment business had become tedious. He was also noting the behavior of the parents around him — some in their second or third pilot seasons — the desperate bribing of their kids to audition; the angry bad-mouthing of the teachers. ("Parents are willing to spend the money," Jay says, "but they want results.") Jay decided early on not to live at the Oakwood and to send Jaysha to a conventional Catholic school to try to maintain some semblance of an ordinary childhood. But he still sent her to all the available classes: a five-week course with a casting director ($390); eight sessions on cold reading ($365); and a six-hour intensive on the same ($150). For the second time, she was taking the cold-reading classes with Joey Paul Jensen, who casts for Disney. Jay likes Jensen because she's no-nonsense and says that Jaysha is constantly improving. Jay says he hopes that she'll keep Jaysha in mind for a coming role.

But Jensen says the numbers are against most kids. For minor or supporting roles on pilots, Jensen can easily audition 500 to 600 children — seeing one kid every two to five minutes. "You put out a casting call, you need a 7-year-old with red hair, one blue eye and one brown eye, and there are hundreds of kids in the waiting room in 10 minutes," says Marc Warren, Jensen's colleague, who wrote for the Disney TV show "That's So Raven."

Jensen does agree, however, with Jay's original hunch: the time is ripe for ethnic types. And although Jaysha's Indian, she can cross over to Hispanic, and there's always a dearth of 10- to 12-year-old Latina girls.

So far, Jay's sure bet has turned out to be a gamble; he's spent $50,000 and can't seem to stop. "June 1, I can say I tried everything," he says. "We tried everything." Then he is planning to take a break. But he expects to return later in the summer. "When I see the directors really like Jaysha, I feel like I can stick it out." (In fact, at the end of May, Jaysha would get her first major role in a film called "Quest of Alchemy," in which she plays the daughter of a Hindu mother and American father.) He's toying with the idea of relocating to Los Angeles, but he's more tentative about his decisions. While Hollywood may be ruining his health and his financial security, he knows one thing: it has profoundly changed his ideas about being a parent. He used to be self-absorbed, spending his money on expensive MartinLogan speakers and wasting his free time golfing and partying with friends. Now his attention goes to Jaysha, who is becoming more independent and even more relaxed.

One afternoon, Jay dropped off some new head shots of Jaysha to her commercial agent, who encouraged Jay to take some of his own. "I can see him on an elephant," the agent later told me. "He's not Americanized. He's not L.A." Why not? Jay remembers thinking; he was bored. He also invented a résumé, listing credits from fabricated Indian TV shows — "The Hidden Temple" and "The Follower" — in which he claimed to have had guest-starring roles. He landed two auditions in two weeks. Recently, he and Jaysha auditioned for a father-daughter commercial, which renewed his respect for her accomplishments. Jaysha can memorize four pages of dialogue in less than an hour. But Jay, although he had just two lines, blanked when he stepped into the audition room. "It's all right," Jaysha whispered reassuringly.

"You can tell today's a good day!" Marie said as she snapped in her seat belt one Saturday morning while her mother waited to be freed by the Oakwood's security gate.

They were headed to the audition for the Church of Scientology public service announcement. Marie was dressed in high-up pigtails and thick eyeglass frames for effect. In the last year, more than 1,300 children auditioned for 24 P.S.A.'s produced by the Church of Scientology, and roughly 60 got the roles.

At the Celebrity Center, Lori followed Marie past displays charting the accomplishments of L. Ron Hubbard. As Lori signed a release form stating she was not in any way associated with the psychiatric profession and that neither she nor Marie took certain medications (Scientologists believe that "psychiatric drugs destroy individuality"), Marie watched a male Scientologist administering the E-Meter to a young woman at the other end of the ornate room. The device is supposed to help locate spiritual trauma experienced in the person's past.

"Button your Izod," Lori said.

Marie did, then pulled the script from her mother's bag. Lori tried to relax her. "Pick your nose, scratch your butt—"

"Mom," Marie said, "I have to read this." Lori shrugged. Set in a "bustling lunchroom" filled with "a mix of Asian, Hispanic, African-American and Caucasian kids," Marie is a nerdy student smitten by Nick, the "hot dude everybody likes."

A friend of Marie's arrived for the same audition, not nerdily dressed at all: she wore a polka-dot party dress, her costume for a pageant she had to go to immediately afterward.

"Have you gotten anything?" she asked Marie.

"I've been going to auditions," Marie said, exaggerating her busyness. She self-consciously held her elbow across her midriff.

The casting director came for Marie and returned her five minutes later. Her friend wanted to know about this audition — who was in the room, what they wanted, how the space was arranged. Marie answered, and then her friend was called in. Lori was ready to go, but Marie dragged. Her friend wasn't out yet. "Was I that long?" Marie asked.

"No," said her mother, "but it doesn't matter."

"I know."

"I love ya," Lori said. Marie looked worried. "Maybe they are taking a break," Lori added. Marie wasn't listening. "Maybe the lady has diarrhea," Lori offered. Her daughter didn't smile. Marie wanted to see if her friend was given a pre-employment form, which signals a stronger possibility of a call back.

Lori gave Marie a few more moments and said softly, "Marie, I would say that she probably got a form." Marie asked to wait a bit longer in the car. She eyed the people coming and going like a desultory undercover cop. Lori said, "Oh, Marie," then turned the ignition.

Marie confessed that she didn't tell her friend that the casting director had asked for an improvisation because she didn't want to give her the extra five minutes to think of something to say.

Despite her disappointments, Marie had already begun to talk to her mother about coming back to L.A. again this summer. Lori was considering it, though she was counting the days until they returned to Indiana. There was the ongoing separation of their family. Lori knew her husband was O.K. — he was even learning to cook and do the housework — but she missed her son, and she felt bad that she couldn't help her mother-in-law, who just had a stroke. But she was torn. "Marie wants it so bad," Lori told me. "Some kids, they don't really care. But that's not Marie — I don't know if she'll ever be O.K. if she doesn't get what she wants."

One evening, midway through pilot season, Liana and Hannah jumped in the Oakwood's North Clubhouse pool after soaking in the hot tub. The pool lights made the water glimmer beneath the palm trees. The girls did handstands and swam races. Liana did her impression of Jaws. Hannah pretended to drown, frighteningly convincingly. Liana told her how she froze when she was told to do the "Haversham Hall" audition without props. "You know the fun thing about crying on cue?" she asked. "You think about something and then you cry." Hannah didn't like to cry on cue, she said, because it limited her emotional experience.

At 9:30, Hannah's father, Robin, appeared poolside, a fit man with towels in each strong hand. "Time," he said.

"No," said Hannah, going under.

"Time," he said again when she came back up.

"Dad!" Hannah replied, continuing to plead her case as she climbed out. "Can we stay together? Can I go to Liana's?" He wrapped her up, and Hannah scampered beside him on the walkway, Liana sauntering behind.

"You'll see her tomorrow," Robin said.

"It's a long time for a kid," Hannah said. "Normal kids see each other in school every day. How about if she comes to our house? Just for an hour? If we go right to bed?" Robin didn't budge. "It's not fair without a reason," Hannah said. Robin reminded her about her audition at the end of the week. Liana's "Magic" audition was also coming up.

Robin and the girls stopped at Liana's, where Hannah had left her clothes. While the girls took forever changing out of their swimsuits, Rhondelle and Robin's conversation returned to the question that all stage parents ask: How long do you stick it out? Do you keep renting a place at the Oakwood? Buy a condo? In fact, Hannah and Liana would go on to have a good spring: although Liana wouldn't get the part in "Magic," in May she would end up getting the lead as a Welsh girl in a movie; Hannah would be cast as the daughter of a Saudi terrorist in a TV show, "Criminal Minds." But anything less than spectacular success meant that the question would crop up again and again.

Rhondelle had been grappling with this predicament. She had recently been to Ikea and bought a chair and couch covers to make the apartment more cozy and had been talking to George about staying through the summer. But he missed them. "He's trying to wrap up some business so he can spend more time in L.A, but there's the meantime."

Hannah darted out of the bedroom. Robin snatched her up under one arm. Robin moved backward toward the door, which he opened with his free hand. Like a grande dame, Hannah bestowed her parting kisses and graciously bowed goodbye.

The door slammed shut. Rhondelle told Liana to take a shower. Liana wanted to take it tomorrow. Rhondelle told her to get ready for bed. "Can I sleep late?" Liana asked.

As Rhondelle returned to correcting Liana's home-school worksheets, she fretted out loud. Liana dropped onto the couch in her wet bathing suit and pulled a throw over her knees. She updated Rhondelle about Hannah's latest news: she was in the final rounds for a role in a movie with Nicole Kidman. As always, Rhondelle had lots of questions — about that audition, about whether or not Hannah had heard back from the "E.R." casting director who sees only a few girls at a time. But by this point, Liana had learned to both reassure her mother and comfort herself, without bad-mouthing her friend. Teasing out the strands of her blond hair, she said, "They wanted someone who didn't look like Nicole Kidman, so it couldn't be me."

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is the author of "Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx." She is at work on a book about comedians.
###

Fantasy Baseball

Fantasy baseball is something i know little about. I have never played, nor have wanted to play. But it does hold the attention of a lot of guys. Here's why. Enjoy.

The New York Times
June 4, 2006
Books on Fantasy Baseball
I'll Manage
Review by HUGO LINDGREN

DO you do fantasy? A fella could get punched for asking a question like that, but when a male colleague whispered it to me once as we stood on the outskirts of a meeting, I knew what he meant. He merely wanted to know if I play fantasy, a k a rotisserie, baseball, a game that unites thousands of American men in a time-wasting exercise of epic proportion. It works like this: A bunch of guys carve up major league rosters to form their own baseball teams, then use the statistics of those players to determine who has the better team over the course of a full season. It sounds harmless enough, but leads naturally to excess. Fantasy baseball has been known to supersede art, literature, nourishment, personal hygiene, parenthood and sex in the lives of its players, turning them into pitiful bores who take their laptops to bed because they can't sleep until they know the results of the West Coast games. And that's a mild case.

Fantasy baseball has flourished as the game itself has been displaced as the national sport. Football left it in the dust years ago, and even auto racing has roared past. But while those sports inspire devotional mass followings, they don't engage people's brains the way baseball does. If football has won our hearts (and certainly our adrenal glands), baseball still owns our minds. And one of the main reasons is the wealth of statistics the game throws off. The data are studied and crunched and conjectured and argued over, creating a kind of parallel universe that these two books provide a window into.

"The Mind of Bill James," by Scott Gray, is about baseball's leading intellectual. James is not a fantasy guy per se, but his work springs from similar obsessions. He emerged in the late 1970's by self-publishing an annual polemic called the "Baseball Abstract." James didn't know a thing about actually playing the game. He couldn't hit a ball off a tee. But as a nerd who'd strayed into the land of the jocks ("I just happened to discover baseball cards at the right time," he tells Gray), he set out to prove his mastery of it through writing.

James saw things about baseball that others didn't. People thought the batting average that flashed on the TV screen when a hitter came to the plate automatically told them something concrete about how good he was. Nope, James said, batting averages can be a mirage. You want to gauge a hitter's contributions; you need to look at his on-base percentage and slugging percentage. And then you have to compensate for the ballpark he's playing in. Of course, it also matters whether the pitcher he's facing is left-handed or right-handed. Sometimes it matters whether it's a day game or a night game, or if it's early in the season or late.

James dissected baseball. He took the game apart, evaluated all its pieces, then put the thing back together, rendering it more comprehensible and beautiful. He was funny and never reduced baseball to mere numbers — he had his sentimental favorites, like Amos Otis and pretty much anybody who wore a Kansas City Royals uniform in the late 70's — and one of his less heralded skills was the ability to write so vividly and authoritatively about baseball history it was as if he had been there to witness it all himself.

He could also be as mean as any call-in-show crank. He described one hapless American Leaguer as playing the outfield "like a blind man staying overnight in a friend's apartment." His all-time favorite whipping boy, though, was poor Enos Cabell, who played 15 years in the major leagues and compiled a lifetime average of .277. A respectable career, right? Hardly. Cabell had little patience at the plate and didn't hit nearly enough home runs to hold his own as a third baseman, deficiencies that offended James's sense of right and wrong. "Everybody tells me that Enos is a hell of a good guy, and you know, you can tell he is," James wrote. "His abilities being what they are, would he be in the major leagues if he wasn't?"

James produced his "Baseball Abstracts" for 12 years before burning out. By the end of his run, he was an influential, albeit polarizing, figure in the world of baseball. It was mainly his ideas that helped Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's and star of Michael Lewis's best-selling "Moneyball," to build winning teams on a shoestring budget. James himself ended up in the employ of the Boston Red Sox.

Gray, whose day job is writing Street & Smith's sports annuals, does well with the basic elements of James's biography, painting an empathetic portrait of him as a social misfit who overcame a mostly unhappy childhood by discovering baseball as a world he could understand. But about halfway through, Gray loses chronological momentum, and tries to patch his way to the finish in a discursive style that he seems to have borrowed unsuccessfully from James himself. At times, he gets embarrassingly panegyric — "Those who immersed themselves in the 'Baseball Abstract' grew up to spread Bill's influence in every arena that involves thinking or writing," he says — and when he lets James ramble on about things like the JonBenet Ramsey case, our hero starts to sound less like a genius and more like a tiresome dinner party guest.

In Sam Walker's "Fantasyland," we meet a lot of characters whose lives are as shaped by baseball as James's is. This book fits into the newly popular genre of stunt nonfiction, like the ones about reading the whole encyclopedia or saying yes to every guy who asks you out for a year. Walker's stunt is, on the face of it, not terribly impressive: he joins the toughest fantasy baseball league, called Tout Wars, which is composed of experts who make a living by telling others how to win at fantasy baseball. (You'd be amazed at how many of these people are out there.)

Walker is a writer for The Wall Street Journal, and his plan was to use his press access to major league locker rooms to help him pick up inside dope that the homebound number crunchers in his league couldn't get. But that's not all: he also hired two guys to aid him in various research and scouting capacities. If this sounds ridiculous, well, maybe that's the point. It was Walker's intention to give his life and his wallet over to fantasy baseball and see how good he could be at it.

A few comic moments ensue when Walker attempts to earnestly engage major leaguers in discussion of his fantasy team. As reporting challenges go, it's not quite up there with, say, knocking on a widow's door, but Walker's nerve is admirable all the same. It would be more admirable if any of them actually gave him useful information. But even the ones willing to play along don't have any insights that help Walker. So all his sleuthing around clubhouses pays little reward.

Which is sort of the problem with the whole book. Walker comes off as a witty, affable guy whom you'd be happy to have a few beers with and talk baseball. But his audacious enterprise can't sustain the full weight of the book. The narrative has no suspense because Walker fails to convince us that it really matters to him whether he finishes first or last. And if it doesn't matter to him, how in the world are we going to care?

The typical fantasy baseball player is a glutton for information, for anything that gives him the edge. I know this because, yes, I do do fantasy. And even though I'm not good at it (despite occasionally taking the laptop to bed to wait for those West Coast scores), I can say one thing with total authority — if you're looking for the secret to success in your league, you won't find it in this book. And what else matters?

Hugo Lindgren is the editorial director of New York magazine.
###

Man Things

What it means to be a man has changed dramatically in some ways over the last half-century. Here's yet another take on this subject. Enjoy.

PHOTO: George Ouzounian, also known as "Maddox."

It's a man's world
"Maddox," the Web programmer turned pop-culture hero whose book "The Alphabet of Manliness" recently leapt to the top of Amazon's sales list, talks about obedient wives, the craze for all things manly, and whether the next generation is going to be "totally puss-onified"

By Rebecca Traister

Jun. 02, 2006 | George Ouzounian, aka "Maddox," creator of "The Best Page in the Universe" and author of the forthcoming "Alphabet of Manliness," is making more hay on testosterone than a bull breeder. His Web site, which he started in 1997 while a programmer at a telemarketing company and which trumpets his disregard for authority and political correctness, gets 1 million unique visitors a month. "The Alphabet of Manliness," a letter-by-letter guide to all things male, macho and masculine, is pumped full of aggression toward the weak, the flabby, the girly men of the world. The book, and its author, have become this season's publishing phenomenon: When it became available by preorder, Maddox sent a note to his mailing list and, overnight, "Alphabet" shot to the No. 1 spot on Amazon. "Alphabet" is a triumph of word-of-mouth publicity: The book's publisher, Citadel Press, has done very little to promote it, and Maddox himself has given only a few brief interviews, but it has hovered in the top 70, often in the top 20, for the two months since its initial ascent. All this, and it doesn't hit shelves until Tuesday, June 6.

Others besides Maddox have discovered there's money to be made in the XY genotype: A manliness assault has been carpet-bombing bookstores and television stations for some months. Along with Tucker Max's "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell," Maddox was dubbed part of a new genre of "Fratire" by the New York Times last month. There's been Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield's much derided homage to potency, "Manliness." Also on my desk is "Manthology: Poems on the Male Experience," from the University of Iowa Press. Turn on a television and you'll find one of the summer's phallustastic ad campaigns: Burt Reynolds and company sell Miller Lite with man laws forged by the "Men of the Square Table"; Burger King boys sing a nonsensical "Manthem" ("I am hungry! I am incorrigible! I am man!") about their refusal to eat "chick food" like quiche; TGI Friday's even has a campaign in which dudes bang their utensils on a table and shout about the meat products they are about to consume. Pork! Beef! Sausage! You get the picture!

"The Alphabet of Manliness" is very much in this masculinity-as-sketch-comedy mold, and some of it is pretty funny. Take the entry for "N," which is "Norris, Chuck." "Chuck Norris eats rocks and shits lightning bolts," the chapter begins. "One time Chuck Norris was walking around in the forest, looking for hippies to use as firewood, when a wild boar suddenly crossed his path. Big mistake. Chuck lifted the boar into the air with his mind, spun him around, and digested him telekinetically. And Chuck wasn't even hungry." The "Alphabet's" illustrations (by eight artists, two of them women) are a varied affair, depicting pirates ejaculating leprechauns, physically combative sperm, a wide variety of boners, and Xanthippe's frozen tundra of a vagina inhabited by some penguins and a polar bear.

Intentionally outrageous, Maddox's humor waves its anti-p.c. flag high. Women, naturally, are the main foils. Again from the Norris chapter: "Chuck Norris has no mother, as crawling out of a vagina is unbecoming of a man of his stature."

Some of Maddox's over-the-top riffs are funny, but others are tone-deaf and dumb. Warning his readers to be wary when picking up women at bars, he writes: "Listen for a faint whistling noise coming from between her legs, as if wind were passing through a large, hollow cavern. If you hear this sound, your prospective woman may have a condition commonly referred to as 'whore.'"

Still, it's tough to get too worked up about even such retro-grody passages. Maddox's brand of humor -- in which pirates, lumberjacks, farting, quickies and beef jerky are good, and babies, vegetarians, hippies and Mozart are bad -- is typical of a certain species of amiable, clueless 20-to-30ish males, who may take cathartic pleasure in rhetorically rampaging around like big swinging dicks but who probably eat quiche and are nice to their girlfriends at home.

When Salon spoke to the 28-year-old Salt Lake City native and his publicist by phone, it was his first extensive conversation with the press. Maddox -- the nickname comes from an old anime cartoon called "Maddox 01" -- turned out to be a soft-spoken young man, short on media training and practiced answers, who seemed slightly stunned by his own success. He couldn't help but snigger at references to some of his own jokes, like the one about committing suicide by "licking a hooker's ass."

You run an extremely popular Web site with a cult following. What is it that readers get from you?

When you're trying to send a message to someone, if you wrap it in humor it sticks a lot better. It's like the sugar with the medicine. People remember things when they laugh. I've never studied marketing, but I'm guessing that that's why lots of commercials try to be funny. And if "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" did dry political shows they wouldn't get nearly as many people watching. So hopefully people can take away something more from my site than just the humor, but the No. 1 reason people come is to laugh.

But what's the sugar-coated message you want them to take away?

The No. 1 thing is my resentment of trends and this group-think mentality. A lot of people feel the same way I do when I see someone in a brand-new $200 pair of jeans with holes in it, or premature fades. The people who wear these jeans are people who are trying to buy this genuine aged look that only comes from years of hard work and not being able to afford new jeans. Trying to artificially buy this look upsets a lot of people. So it's a rejection of pop culture and trends. But I guess I have to be aware that the larger my site becomes, the more I'm becoming a trend myself.

What are your politics?

In terms of the two major parties, I'm politically neutral. When Clinton was in office, I wasn't happy and I wrote articles bashing him, and people called me on the right. Now that Bush is in office, I'm not happy and people say I'm on the left. So I think I'm doing something right. The very first year I could vote, I voted for Perot. I think Ross "The Boss" Perot was the man.

How did you move from your anti-trend Web site to a book about manliness?

Well, I was reading this book about lesbians, and it had pictures in it. It was almost like a graphic novel. And I was thinking, "Why hasn't someone done this kind of book, except for guys?" The way I've written the book is as a parody of a children's book and a reference book. And I always wanted to write children's books, except I hate kids.

Is that true?

Oh yeah. My favorite kids book is "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs." It's so creative, and that's the book that sparked my imagination as a child and here I am, bitter and balding, and I never got to write that book. But I did write this book, which is kind of a parody of a children's book. I didn't write a book about food that falls from the sky, but I did write a book about boners.

Right. Masculinity.

The new masculinity.

What is the new masculinity?

The new masculinity is a muted version of the old masculinity. When I talk about old masculinity I'm talking about guys like my dad. My dad is a really tough guy. He fought in Korea, and if you took a look at this guy's hands you would see [that they] are big and callused and gnarled and there's stuff just oozing from them, and I think he has oil stains that are there permanently. And my hands in comparison are not like that. Sometimes he grabs my hands, and he calls me a pussy, and he walks away. To give you an idea what kind of guy he is, we went fishing once and he didn't have anything to gut and clean the fish, so he bit into its stomach and bit its guts out and spit them on the ground. True story. I was 13 or 14.

Were you horrified?

Yeah. I pretty much was. When I was a kid I was scared of June bugs, and he would take them and eat them, I guess to scare me more or something ... I've never seen my dad listen to music in my life. Radio in his car is probably the least-used piece of equipment. I've never seen him intentionally watch TV. The only thing that guy likes to do is work, and usually with tools.

Is your dad's model of masculinity what men today should be aspiring to?

It's hard to say because the world is changing. Obviously we're working with computers, you and I, and my dad and his generation didn't. But the reason books like mine and books like Harvey Mansfield's are coming out is that it's a callback to this feeling of the manly man, like this nostalgic feeling. It's a good feeling to know that there are guys out there like that.

You don't think men are going to start acting like that again?

No. You have, I hate to use the word, but the "metrosexual" revolution: guys who know what conditioner is. My girlfriend's been trying to convince me that it's useful for years. Guys today know cosmetics. Guys know these things that are traditionally feminine and books like mine are a callback to the old-school masculinity.

But Mansfield's book is a call to arms, hoping to get men to behave like that again. Yours seems to be making light of that kind of man.

My book is a much more lighthearted approach to the subject. Mansfield is a Harvard professor. His book has a thesis, and he's talking about wars, and the things that shaped man, and the people who read his book are much more the NPR crowd, people who are actually really interested in the subject. Whereas in my book, I don't have a thesis. I'd be surprised if there was a single fact in my book that people could take away. There's satire in my book about modern life. It's a much more cynical approach to manliness that will eventually have a larger impact because people like comedy.

OK, but the things that have altered the role of men -- computers, as you said, and different kinds of wars and the feminist movement -- would you say they were bad things?

No, I would not. It's just that the world has changed. It's gone too far forward to go so far back. I can't even foresee a world in which that [kind of man] could happen again unless there was a nuclear holocaust and we lost most of our electrical infrastructure. Then you would see manly men like my dad. I wouldn't necessarily say that how things have changed is all for the better, but most of the changes were necessary.

What changes have not been for the better?

I'm not sure the feminist movement accomplished all its goals. People today have a backlash to the feminist movement. The [figure] who is remembered when you think of feminism, by people who haven't studied it, is the [un]shaved girl burning her bra, standing on campus screaming at everybody. That's definitely not a positive image. I think the feminist movement went a little too far. But a lot of things have changed for the better from the eras of segregation and huge racism and the civil rights movement.

I noticed on your site that you seem sensitive to issues of race, in entries like your rant about the term "African-American." Some of the things about women in your book -- for example when you write about the wind whistling through a woman's cavernous vagina -- would you be able to make those kinds of derogatory jokes about, for instance, black people?

No, definitely not. Because first of all, I'm not black. I think if someone makes those types of jokes about racial or ethnic groups, they have to have viewed it themselves. Very few comics are able to do that and get away with it, and the idea is if you understand the trouble or the pain that that stereotype comes from, then it's OK to laugh at it because you're laughing at it yourself. As for the writing about women, one interesting statistic is that 40 to 45 percent of my readers are female. The types of women who read my material and don't get offended and like it are really smart women who get it. They know at end of the day [what the reality is]. I wrote this piece once called "Why change your car's oil when your girlfriend can do it?" and it was about how I was sitting inside my house on a lazy Saturday playing videogames and my girlfriend was out trying to change my car's oil and it was this crazy misogynistic piece. [In life] I treat my girlfriend with respect; I don't expect her to do the dishes or the laundry. The section on owning a woman was written as a parody of a dog-training manual and it originally had a lot more offensive stuff that my publisher made me take out for people who didn't understand dog manuals. I had stuff about checking her stool for worms before you choose a girlfriend.

OK, but back to the part about how you wouldn't make jokes about black people because you're not black -- you're also not a woman.

That's a very good observation. And the women who read my writing, who read these misogynistic observations, understand that I have in fact studied, and I do in fact live the opposite way. My dad is probably [more] traditional and he thinks women have their role in society and that role is to take care of children and to cook and to clean. At the end of the day the reason I write this stuff is because guys like it, and the majority of my audience is men. It's so out there; it's so wrong; and I think I'm going after some easy targets here.

But why are women an easier target than a racial minority?

Well, that's a really tough question but probably the difference is in the scope of the suffering. Talking about not being able to vote versus picking cotton in the field ... I don't know, it just seems the civil rights movement for blacks in this country was against a much stronger evil. Teasing women about not being able to vote is different than teasing a black person about the history of slavery. I'd have to think about it more. [Institutionalized racism] is a much more extreme version of discrimination; there's a lot more pain and suffering associated with the civil rights movement.

But can I be a humorless feminist for a moment by suggesting that the lesson here seems to be that women are a group it's still OK -- and funny! -- to say mean and derogatory things about?

Publicist K. Darryl Pierce: I was just going to say that. The bottom line is, you can say these things about women. We're not saying you guys don't have a point!

(In a follow-up e-mail, Maddox clarified that "my jabs at women, taken in context, are not serious, which is why it's okay. At the end of the day, I'm writing these things in a book where I also write about lesbian robots, boners, Cyclopses, and pirates, so people know I'm not serious, which is why I can get away with it.")

OK, back to manliness: Why choose it as your topic?

When writing this book, I did so much research, and before mine there was only one book that was even remotely like it, called the "Big Damn Book of Manliness." And that book approaches manliness in a very traditional fashion, like writing about golf. I don't really write about sports at all in my book -- it's so cliché. But literally there was nothing written before it about manliness except for a few academic papers and that one book. Now it's everywhere! My editor called it the "zeitgeist."

Have you seen these ad campaigns for Burger King and Miller Lite?

Yes, we love those!

But in those ads, as in your book, old-style manliness equals buffoonery. Do you think that they're treating traditional masculinity as a joke rather than an ideal?

I would say so. It even goes back to why it's OK to make fun of women in the way that I do: It's because it's not realistic anymore. I'm sure somewhere in some backwater city it's still happening, but for the most part men realize it's not OK to treat women as they've been treated in the past. Perceptions have changed, and for the first time in history there's a woman who might run for president and has a good shot of winning. We live in different world. So this callback caricature of manliness we're seeing in pop culture -- the old knuckle-dragging man -- it's a stereotype, and with the stereotype of man comes the stereotype of woman.

Do you think that the fact that that stereotype is evoked humorously means we are saying goodbye to it?

Yeah. I was thinking about it, and that's the end of it. The end of a generation. I shudder to think what our kids are going to be like. Is the next generation going to continue to be totally puss-onified? I think I just coined that! But are they going to continue the trend toward being pussies? I don't know. It's kind of unsettling. But when I talk about women within their roles, I mean it nostalgically. I don't mean it in the way that people do when they want to plot some nefarious scheme to keep women down. I mean it in the nostalgic sense. When I came home it was a nice feeling to know that my mom was baking cookies. It was just a nice feeling. It's not an intentional conspiracy to keep women down.

Are you now doing the site and the writing full time?

Yeah. It was a difficult decision to make. I've given up a lot of money in order to do this for my fans. I could be making a pretty decent living as a programmer. And I could be making a really good income if I had ads on my site.

Pierce: Maddox turns down 10 to 12 thousand dollars a month in ads.

Why?

I think that ads cause self-censorship. For example, if I had gone the route of selling ads on my site, there's a possibility that there would have been Orbitz ads on my site. So if I ever wanted to write about Orbitz, as I did, I might have thought to myself, "This money-making is really good. Maybe I'll write about something else." I'm not saying I necessarily would have, but it's possible. I don't want that level of self-censorship. Also, ads are annoying.

I know the book hit No. 1 on Amazon early, but do you know how much it's sold so far?

Pierce: No. We don't have any pre-release numbers. What we're hearing is that we have a legitimate shot of taking the No. 1 spot, beating Ann Coulter, whose book comes out the same day. And if not, hitting the top 10, which for someone like Maddox is amazing.

Maddox, how do you feel about being up against Ann Coulter?

It's a David and Goliath fight. According to the Drudge Report, her print run is going to be 500,000, and she's going to get buzz from the usual suspects: Fox News, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh. How can I possibly compete with that? I don't have that kind of pull in the media. Around 70 million people have seen my Web site but I still struggle when I sit down in meetings to explain who I am. I'm the little guy.

Do you like Ann Coulter?

No. I don't. I very much don't. I think a lot of the things she says polarize this country. I don't think she's a very nice person, and I don't think she believes a lot of what she says. She's the political equivalent of a shock-jock.

Well, some people might compare you to her. You say things that are controversial and un-p.c. and I don't think you believe a lot of what you say.

The difference is when I joke about a woman going to make me a sandwich, people will shrug it off. But there are significant numbers of people out there who take her word as gospel. I have a lot of pull with my fans; I have credibility; and I haven't made money on ads. So my fans trust me, and I if I attack someone I have to be very careful ... There was a guy in Atlanta who plagiarized me and I wrote about it and my fans went nuts. Finally he read an on-air apology. I didn't want the guy to lose his job. So there's a lot of responsibility you have to have when you have a voice. People listen to you. My fans, a lot of them are really smart, but some really aren't. And they take some of the things I say at face value. It's almost a fight-club mentality. I've even received e-mails from people in militias, saying "Hey Maddox, we have 20 soldiers around the country waiting for your orders." It's kinda scary. But better that someone like me can command these people not to do anything rather than someone who's really nuts or more nuts than I am. So back to Ann Coulter: She's a good example of someone who has a voice but isn't acting responsibly with it.

-- By Rebecca Traister
Salon Media Group, Inc
101 Spear Street, Suite 203
San Francisco, CA 94105
Telephone 415 645-9200
Fax 415 645-9204
###

Aging & Depression

Why we treat those at the fringes of life (the very young, the very old) so dismissively I dont know. Just look at the value of those professions which deal with these groups (child care, teachers, nursing home emplyees) and you see underpaid, overworked people caring for our young and old. One day, I trust, hope, and pray that we shall value these folks more. Read this and weep.

The New York Times
May 30, 2006
Personal Health
Age Is No Barrier to Lifting Depression's Heavy Veil
By JANE E. BRODY

Depression afflicts people of all ages, but it can be particularly devastating for older people, who are less likely to seek treatment and more likely to commit suicide than younger adults similarly afflicted. The problems include the failure to recognize the symptoms of depression in the elderly and the belief that nothing can be done for people with ample reason to be depressed.

Some elderly people continue to regard depression as shameful or a sign of weakness that should not be acknowledged even to physicians. Physicians, in turn, often fail to ask the questions that will find depression in their older patients.

The elderly came of age when little could be done for depression or when the only treatments caused serious side effects. These are some of the quite different facts about the problem:

•Depression is an illness of the brain, no different from diseases of other organs. It should be diagnosed and treated just like any other disease.

•Regardless of health, treating depression is as effective in the elderly as in younger people.

•Relieving depression for an older person not only improves mood, outlook and enjoyment, but it can also reduce physical symptoms and prolong life. Even among those with dementia, effective treatment often reduces their symptoms.

•Treatments have come an extremely long way in recent years. There are now many choices of effective antidepressants, including those with minimal side effects, and even the much-feared "electroshock" therapy is much safer today.

Diagnosis Can Be Tricky

The size of the problem is startling in itself. One person in seven over 65 suffers from depression, but 70 to 90 percent, depending on who's counting, receive no treatment for it.

A major reason for the huge gap between the numbers of people in need of treatment and the numbers receiving it is the difficulty in diagnosing depression when symptoms are not typical or are easily confused with a physical ailment.

Classic signs include persistent sadness, withdrawal from activities once enjoyed, difficulty sleeping and concentrating, and poor appetite.

Although some or all of these conditions may also be present in depressed older people, their symptoms may also include signs of dementia like memory problems and confusion, neglect of personal appearance, feelings of irritability or anxiety, pacing and fidgeting, lack of energy and even delusions and hallucinations. And people can be depressed without feeling sad. Rather, their emotional disorder is expressed more in physical terms, like vague complaints of aches and pains or gastrointestinal upset.

Many common stressful events can be seen as an explanation for depression: the death of a spouse or close friend; retirement with nothing satisfying to do; having to move from a family home or familiar neighborhood; losses in vision, hearing or mobility; or the developing a chronic or life-threatening illness.

Although any of these factors can result in temporary feelings of grief, loss and sadness, when such feelings persist for more than, say, six months, clinical depression is the more likely diagnosis. Clinical depression rarely, if ever, cures itself. It needs to be treated professionally.

Clinical depression is all the more likely if the person had previous depressive episodes or if the person's parents, siblings or children experienced depression. Among those with a genetic vulnerability, any major life change can bring on clinical depression.

People lacking such vulnerability typically bounce back within weeks or months of an emotionally challenging event and may remain cheerful even when death is imminent.

Certain disorders, particularly strokes and ministrokes, can cause depression by injuring the brain. Many medications commonly taken by older people can make the depression worse, among them steroids, anticancer drugs, tranquilizers, anti-anxiety agents and drugs for Parkinson's disease, high blood pressure, heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis and pain.

But it is also important to realize that depression can take hold of a person without any apparent reason. Clinical depression involves a disruption in brain chemicals that can occur with or without a precipitating event.

Older women are nearly twice as likely as older men to become seriously depressed, a fact that some attribute to hormonal or other biological factors. A vitamin B12 deficiency has also been linked to severe depression in older women. People who live alone without supportive social networks also have higher rates of depression.

Value of Treatment

Untreated depression can shorten life and make what time remains not worth living. It is also hard to live with or be around a depressed person, leading to a withdrawal of family and social support, in turn feeding the depression.

Depression has been shown to worsen the symptoms of dementia and to make existing physical ailments like heart disease worse, possibly because depressed people are less conscientious about following prescribed remedies.

By suppressing the immune system, depression may render people more vulnerable to infectious diseases. Depressed older people may be so despondent that they become incontinent, unable to walk or unable to care for themselves.

Remedies Are Abundant

Depression should be regarded as a chronic disease, no less in need of therapy than heart disease or diabetes. The therapeutic possibilities in the modern medical armamentarium are large, and if one remedy fails, others are available. Experts say that more than 80 percent of older depressed people respond well or completely to one or another therapeutic approach.

A recent study indicated that many of them would prefer talk therapy first, resorting to medication only if that is not helpful enough. Most psychiatrists today, however, consider antidepressant medication to be a necessary first step that can make talk therapy more effective.

Compared with older antidepressants, the modern S.S.R.I.'s (for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) and the N.S.R.I.'s (for norepinephrine and serotonin reuptake inhibitors) have fewer side effects and do not interact with as many other medications.

Each drug works a little differently from others in its class. If one does not bring noticeable relief in 6 to 12 weeks, another can be tried. If none of the newer drugs help, older ones — MAO (monoamine oxidase) inhibitors and tricyclic antidepressants — can be tried. Sometimes combining two drugs works.

Medication can be used with psychotherapy or by itself. Psychotherapy can also be used alone, although studies indicate that it is rarely enough to counter severe depression. Psychopharmacologists warn that, to reduce the risk of a relapse, antidepressants should be taken for six months to a year after depression lifts. In some cases, the drugs may needed for life.

If both these approaches fail — and especially if a person is at risk of suicide — electroconvulsive therapy is often useful, especially when depression is accompanied by psychosis or delusions. Its beneficial effect is immediate.

Also, it uses far less electricity than it once did. Its only known side effect is temporary memory loss, but for some the loss is prolonged.
###

All together now

The anthology is at once the most natural and also the most exciting form a book (or a sotorytelling circle) can take - because no where in nature does ONE element dominate - it's all a mix and blend of several. In fact, I am looking now for others with whom I have worked to join me in several anthology projects I feel would be fun. Enjoy.

The New York Times
May 28, 2006
I Confess: One Theme, 30 Writers, a Trend
By CHARLES McGRATH

CHICK lit. True crime. Diet books. Recovery memoirs. Books about Britney. The publishing industry is a staunch believer in the principle that too much is never enough. The latest genre to flood the shelves in possibly excessive numbers, you may have noticed, is the anthology, but not the sort we used to lug to class.

This new kind of anthology assembles first-person confessional essays, rather than, say, discussions of sanitation and personal hygiene in the Middle Ages, and is readily distinguished by an annoyingly cute title and a numeral specifying the number of writers who bare their souls on a range of intimate topics: "Maybe Baby: 28 Writers Tell the Truth About Skepticism, Infertility, Baby Lust, Childlessness, Ambivalence and How They Made the Biggest Decision of Their Lives"; "Roar Softly and Carry a Great Lipstick: 28 Women Writers on Life, Sex and Survival"; "Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race and Themselves."

"If memoir is the new fiction, then maybe anthologies are the new memoir," said Elizabeth Kaplan, the agent who helped create the trend in 2002 when she sold "The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood and Marriage." "They've tapped into something in the air."

Men have occasionally been known to write this kind of confessional lit. In response to "The Bitch in the House," for example, there was "The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood and Freedom." And men may even read these first-person anthologies, though not in great numbers, apparently, and seldom on the subway or in other public places. "Most of the ones aimed at men pretty much fail miserably," said Sally Wofford-Girand, an agent who has handled a number of the books.

The phenomenon is largely a female one, in other words, with most of the essays by women and for women presumably in the same boat — trying to "have it all" while also achieving "balance" in their lives — only without access to a word processor. Certain writers, like Anne Lamott and Pam Houston, turn up all the time and on a variety of subjects, but it's hard to think of a female writer with a byline who hasn't succumbed at least once.

There are anthologies about dieting, Jewish guilt, divorce and breaking up with your friends, and forthcoming ones about money, aging and women behaving badly. But the books that give off the most heat (and generate the most sales) tend in one way or another to be about motherhood and child-rearing — about whether to have children in the first place and about who then takes care of them.

"The Bitch in the House," edited by Cathi Hanauer, was briefly a best seller, landing some of its contributors on the "Today" show, and it remains the role model for the rest, none of which have attained the same degree of success. The theme of "Bitch in the House" is pretty much summed up by the title: the 26 women telling the truth about sex, solitude and work, for the most part, were mad as hornets.

"Bitch in the House" struck a nerve, as people in the book business like to say, and more to the point, it created a repeatable publishing formula and spawned a mini-industry. It was quickly followed by "The Bastard on the Couch," edited by Daniel Jones, who, not coincidentally, happened to be Ms. Hanauer's husband and (the world of confessional lit is a small one) was later hired by The New York Times to edit the Modern Love column in Sunday Styles, which has excerpted a number of articles from the first-person anthologies.

What were these women so steamed up about? Men, in a word. Men who don't do their share of housework and child care, or men — in the case of a showoff married to one of the essayists — who venture to do more than their share. Men who, the essayist Karen Karbo says, operate only in binary mode: you can ask them to do something or tell them how to do it, but not both.

A man reading this book could hardly be faulted for concluding, as men always have, that when one's wife or companion is angry the best strategy is to slink out of the house as quickly and as quietly as possible. Not that men are blameless. Some of the male essayists in "The Bastard on the Couch" manage a sort of whiny self-defense, but most of the 17 contributors to "Committed: Men Tell Stories of Love, Commitment and Marriage," with a preface by Jay McInerney, the well-known serial committer, come across as sublimely clueless.

The essays in this book present a fairly consistent narrative: the writer, a self-proclaimed idiot (the term of choice is actually a more anatomical one), after floundering around for years (though enjoying, as he modestly admits, a healthy amount of hot action on the futon), suddenly finds himself blown away by a "stone babe" who is "willowy" or else "gleamy eyed" and "leggy" and instantly commits, without a moment's thought or regret.

As David Owen writes, explaining his decision to marry quite young: "If you don't know what you're doing, simply gathering more facts is unlikely to improve the outcome."

An oddly similar kind of innocence pervades "The May Queen: Women on Life, Love, Work and Pulling It All Together in Your 30's," a new anthology in which most of the essayists, after some mildly inappropriate choices, wind up with Mr. Right. (For really inappropriate choices you need to consult "Roar Softly": junkies, married men, guys who douse themselves with patchouli.)

As often as not, Mr. Right has a deeply spiritual side. (Hint to guys: "Let me bring you peace" is an excellent pickup line.) And unlike the writers in most of the other anthologies, these women really do seem able to have it all, or to think they can. A surprising number manage to give birth just when they are publishing their first novel or collection, and the two processes — writing and gestating — seem almost indistinguishable.

The difference between a bitch in the house and the May queens, one is tempted to say, is age. The younger writers haven't yet entered the anger years, nor have they figured out that painful narratives sell better than cheery ones.

There is a ghost in many of these books — the mother of the essayist, who is variously memorialized or blamed for being too perfect, an impossible role model, or for not sufficiently preparing her daughter for the world of work. And there is sometimes a surprising amount of animosity toward other women.

Some of the most thoughtful and most deeply felt essays in "Maybe Baby" are those in which the author argues for her decision not to have children and tells the celebrators of motherhood to get off her back. Another anthology, "Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families," is full of accounts of what really do sound like battlefield skirmishes — on the playground and at PTA meetings. "Why are children such a divisive force?" Susan Cheever writes. "What happened to the good old days when women used to fight with men?"

Some of this material is so raw, so personal, so badly written that readers may find themselves wondering: Why do people publish this stuff? Not for the money. Essayists are typically paid a flat fee of $1,000 to $1,500, which in most cases works out to much less than a dollar a word (though writers can sometimes pick up extra cash by placing their pieces in magazines or newspapers if the publisher hasn't greedily clung to the serial rights.)

They do it because they have something to get off their chest or because they have some unpublished piece gathering dust in a drawer. Or they do it, as I have (twice: for an anthology about coaches and for a forthcoming book about empty nesters), because some persistent editor twisted their arm. Vanity also works. A smart editor will first line up a couple of name writers, and lesser ones will come quickly flocking, flattered to be in such company.

For this arm-twisting and cajoling, and for polishing the prose of the recruits, the editor gets to keep the rest of the advance, which for an anthology these days tends to be in the high five figures or low six, to use the professional lingo — not a bad payday as editorial work goes but also a profitable and efficient arrangement for the publisher, who doesn't have to do a whole lot and can ride the coattails of all the other anthologies.

Of course the editor also has to come up with a saleable idea. In terms of literary quality, by far the best of the anthologies is "Because I Said So," edited by Camille Peri and Kate Moses, whose guideline is sufficiently vague as to include just about anything written by a woman, from Margaret Talbot's essay about the American Girl dolls to Katherine Whitney's account of meeting her Iranian in-laws.

But the anthologies that sell best tend to push one or two hot buttons, and Susanna Porter, the Random House editor who bought "Mommy Wars," is worried that most of the good ideas have already been used. "There's still a lot of anthologies being submitted," she said. "But publishers are nervous that the fad is on the wane. We're definitely in cautious mode. You can't generalize, but it feels as if the subject pool is getting diluted."

Ms. Wofford-Girand, an agent who has two new anthologies in the works and has a notion percolating for yet another, is more hopeful.

"It's got to be a great idea," she said, "and you have to put it into the hands of great writers, but I still think this form can work. There's always that voyeuristic element. I would not be interested in reading 300 pages about someone's miscarriage or someone's divorce, but I'll gladly read an essay about it."
###

Spalding Gray

From left, Ain Gordon, Hazelle Goodman, Bob Holman and James Urbaniak are some of the actors in "Leftover Stories to Tell."

Spalding Gray and I had a short and tempestuous friendship. In 1995, I was in graduate school at Baylor, and chose for my Master's thesis and analysis of Gray's works with respect to the storytelling/narrative form. We corresponded.

Then he suddenly stopped, writing me one final curt letter, tersely stating that he saw no use in corresponding further. I was devastated. I met him once more, in Seattle, in 2002, when he appeared onstage during the Bumbershoot Festival that occurs every Labor Day weekend.

He was suffering from injuries receivec from an earlier auto accident, and agreed to meet with me briefly backstage. We went to dinner. He encouraged my foray into onologues as a performer, and explained that once i began performing monologues, all the questions I had of him 7 years earlier would be answered. He was right.

Rest in peace, Spalding. Rest in peace.Enjoy.

The New York Times
May 28, 2006
For Spalding Gray, One Last Tale
By NELL CASEY

WHEN Spalding Gray committed suicide, most likely by throwing himself off a Staten Island ferry on a cold January day nearly two and half years ago, he left behind an array of grievers: fans, colleagues, friends and family. People were stunned by the loss of this unusual performer, a man who had been artfully befriending audiences through his confessional monologues since 1977. But Mr. Gray's family — his wife, Kathie Russo; his stepdaughter, Marissa, now 19; and his 9- and 12-year-old sons, Theo and Forrest — had to face a different tragedy: the disappearance of a husband and father. Ms. Russo was suddenly left to keep their family together as well as to shape her own unexpected legacy as Spalding Gray's widow.

"I wanted to do something around Spalding's 65th birthday, which is on June 5," Ms. Russo, 45, recently explained at a Greek restaurant in the West Village. "So I thought, 'Let's do a reading of his work for one night at P.S. 122' — that's where he started all his monologues — 'and I'll put it together.' "

Ms. Russo discussed the idea with Vallejo Gantner, the artistic director of Performance Space 122, and he agreed. Soon after, she mentioned it to David Sefton, the artistic director of U.C.L.A. Live, and he signed on to do the show too. "Then suddenly David sent me a contract for five nights," Ms. Russo exclaimed, "and I was, like, 'I don't know how to do that.' "

She contacted Lucy Sexton, a performance artist and fund-raising consultant for Performance Space 122, and asked if she would help shape the piece. They began to compile a script, culled from Mr. Gray's published work as well as from more personal material: diaries, unperformed stories, poems from his youth (including one called "I Loved a Midget Once"). They even borrowed from a recording Mr. Gray left for Ms. Russo just before his death, in which he announces his plans to commit suicide.

"The first thing that occurred to me was 'Boy, this could really be much more than just a couple of excerpts read by different people,' " Ms. Sexton said, seated across from Ms. Russo at lunch. "Especially when Kathie talked about wanting to use unpublished material, then you're really talking about a fantastic treasure trove."

The product of their collaboration, "Leftover Stories to Tell," will play at Performance Space 122 from May 31 to June 4 and at the Freud Playhouse at the University of California, Los Angeles, from June 14 to June 18. In New York the cast will feature Jonathan Ames, James Urbaniak, Hazelle Goodman, Bob Holman and Ain Gordon. There will also be a different guest performer each evening; Debra Winger, David Strathairn, Steve Buscemi and Olympia Dukakis are among those who have signed on.

In Los Angeles the readers will include Teri Garr, Roger Guenveur Smith, Tommy Tiernan, Mr. Holman and Mr. Gordon, in addition to two surprise participants nightly.

The actors will read selections from Mr. Gray's work that ultimately serve as theater-as-séance. At a reading, the piece so intensely called up the presence of the charmingly neurotic actor that you half-expected him to come loping out on stage to interrupt with a worried joke. It also offers the rich story of his life. (Though with a bit of editing. Renée Shafransky, Mr. Gray's ex-wife and frequent character in his stories, hardly appears in this version.)

The piece mainly moves chronologically, with stories ranging from boyhood swimming dates with his mother, who also took her own life, to a raucous experience at a sweat lodge in Minnesota to his delighted worship of his children.

The show also captures what brought so many fans to Mr. Gray in the first place: a voyeuristic glimpse into the life of a wayward WASP, someone willing to unstintingly report on his own weaknesses and neuroses while using them to create an incisive portrait of relationships, sex, therapy, politics, ambition and family. And he was reliable: always seated at his desk with a shimmering glass of water, always ready to tell a captivating story.

The two women have been presenting the material in workshops since last November, setting up readings and inviting critiques from guests. What has emerged is a seamless fusion of Mr. Gray's private and public lives (the two collide less often than it seems in his monologues) to create a piece of storytelling that might intrigue Mr. Gray himself.

"I feel like he was there," Ms. Russo said. "At our very first reading, we were playing around with a recording of Spalding's voice and the CD got stuck, and so he kept saying, 'I am talking about myself, I am talking about myself,' over and over again. I just threw my arms in the air and said, 'It's Spalding!' "

Mr. Gray is being resurrected elsewhere too. The actor Michael Brandt has just wrapped the New York run of his one-man play "A Spalding Gray Matter," produced by the New Group (naked). The director Steven Soderbergh, who filmed Mr. Gray in "King of the Hill" and in "Gray's Anatomy," is making a documentary about him to be released in 2007 by HDNet Films Production along with Ms. Russo's company, Washington Square Films. And, at Ms. Russo's request, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg officially named June 5 Spalding Gray Day.

"It feels like the first time we're opening the book again and going, 'It's O.K. to talk about Spalding,' " Ms. Sexton explained. "It was such a harsh end. But all those beautiful, graceful moments that he recognized in his work, they still stand. They don't get negated by that last moment."

That last moment is also a crucial part of the performance. The excerpts from his diaries chronicling his mounting agony — sadness steadily runs throughout his work but never as starkly as in his last months — are the most emotional parts of the piece.

Immersing herself in her husband's words, including notes he kept toward the end of his life throughout his depression after a car accident left him seriously injured and disfigured in 2001, also allowed Ms. Russo to shape her own perspective.

"Doing this kind of work has given me time to reflect on who he was to me, to the children, to his audience," said Ms. Russo, who hopes to one day open a center for family survivors of suicide victims. "He was a very important artist to the world, and I don't want him to be forgotten."

On May 4 a preview excerpt of "Leftover Stories to Tell" was performed as a tribute to Mr. Gray and to benefit Performance Space 122. Ms. Russo and Ms. Sexton were there, and so were Mr. Gray's children. The performers — including Rosie O'Donnell, Jay McInerney, Judith Ivey and Eric Bogosian — gave a bold reading of the material. The piece offered a poignant combination of hilarity and despair, finally leaving the audience on its feet in a rousing ovation. It was almost what Mr. Gray was always searching for: "a perfect moment." The only thing missing was Mr. Gray himself.
###

Julia Child

LEFT: Julia Child with her collaborator Simone Beck.

Julia Child has had an enormous influence on my life. She made me proud to be from France. She made me proud to be a man who loves to cook. She made me proud to share my cooking with others, and extol the virtues of French cuisine. Enjoy.

The New York Times
May 28, 2006
'My Life in France,' by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme
Becoming Julia Child
Review by ALAN RIDING

READ no further if you dislike France, consider the French irritating, find French cooking pretentious and the French art de vivre overrated — because Julia Child liked everything about France. And her memoir, "My Life in France," is an affectionate merci for all that France gave her.

True, Child also did a lot for France — and the American palate — by introducing French cuisine to American homes. But this book, written with her husband's great-nephew, Alex Prud'homme, before Child's death at 91 in August 2004, is really a love story: she loved Paul Child, 10 years her senior; she loved France; she loved French cooking; and she loved life. Listen to her: "The sweetness and generosity and politeness and gentleness and humanity of the French had shown me how lovely life can be if one takes time to be friendly." And a few pages later: "Oh, how I adored sweet and natural France, with its human warmth, wonderful smells, graciousness, coziness and freedom of spirit." Yes, mes amis, that's love!

In a foreword, Prud'homme explains that the book had been gestating since 1969, when Julia and Paul organized the records of their life in France between 1948 and 1954: hundreds of letters home, piles of black-and-white photographs (79 are in this book, many taken by Paul) and Julia's notes as she prepared her influential cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," published in 1961. But while she often talked about writing "the France book," Prud'homme recalls, it was only in December 2003, nine years after Paul's death, that she turned to him and said: "All right, dearie, maybe we should work on it together."

The result is a delight. On one level, it's the story of how a "6-foot-2-inch, 36-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian" — her words — discovered the fullness of life in France. On another, it recounts the making of "Julia Child," America's grande dame of French cooking. Inevitably, the stories overlap.

Julia and Paul met in wartime Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where they were working for the Office of Strategic Services. They married in 1946 and moved to Washington. In the winter of 1948, Paul, an amateur painter and photographer, was assigned to run the exhibits office of the United States Information Service at the American Embassy in Paris, and Julia naturally accompanied him. Unlike Paul, she had never been to Europe, spoke no French and had no experience of French cuisine. But on their first day in France, in November 1948, as they drove their imported sky-blue Buick station wagon from Le Havre to Paris, they lunched at a restaurant in Rouen and there Julia's life changed. She recalls the "epiphany" in mouth-watering detail — oysters, sole meunière, salad, cheese and coffee — and concludes: "It was the most exciting meal of my life."

Of course, with Paul as her experienced guide, Paris meant many more exciting meals. Soon, inspired by visits to grocers, butchers and markets and aided by a couple of weighty cookbooks, Julia began probing the mysteries of French cooking in her unheated Left Bank apartment. Then, in October 1949, she signed up to learn the real thing at the École du Cordon Bleu.

The making of "Julia Child" began here, but the road would still be long. For a start, in the school's "short, thin, rather disagreeable owner," Julia at last met someone in France she didn't like. Then, 18 months later, she failed her final examination. But she had a mentor in the chef Max Bugnard, a jolly soul in his late 70's, who never ceased to teach and encourage her. Julia retook the exam and graduated.

Soon afterward, she met two elegant French women, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, both experienced cooks, who joined her in forming L'École des Gourmettes, which offered cooking classes from their homes. Beck and Bertholle were also working on a cookbook; in September 1952, they invited Julia to help prepare it for the American market. "And so," Julia recalls, "our collaboration began."

In the decade that followed, the Childs moved from Paris to Marseille, then to Bonn, back to Washington, then finally to Oslo, before Paul retired and they settled in Cambridge, Mass. Julia describes their peripatetic lives in a bubbly style, offering asides on everything from the horrors of McCarthyism back home to the exhilaration of her first mistral in Marseille. But her main energy went into the cookbook, organizing the existing recipes and gathering new ones for, say, bouillabaisse and aïgo bouïdo, or garlic soup, then testing them with American ingredients in American kitchens. The book, meanwhile, had grown to 700 pages, and in 1958 Houghton Mifflin rejected it as too long. After it was rewritten, it was again turned down, this time as too expensive to produce.

Then, in 1960, Judith Jones at Knopf offered to publish it, requesting only that its working title, "French Recipes for American Cooks," be replaced. The following year, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" came out and fame beckoned for Julia. The book's success led to her popular television cooking classes and, eventually, to Vol. II of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and many more cookbooks.

Meanwhile, the Childs built a stone house next to Beck's in Provence and prolonged their love affair with France. But by 1992, with Paul in a nursing home, Beck dead and Provence no longer a "quiet refuge," Julia finally said goodbye to the home she called La Pitchoune, or "The Little Thing."

"I tried to hold on to my impressions," she writes, "but it was hopeless, as if I were trying to hold on to a dream. No matter. France was my spiritual homeland: it had become part of me, and I a part of it, and so it has remained ever since." But one memory stayed firm, that of her first meal in France. "And thinking back on it now," she concludes, "reminds me that the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite — toujours bon appétit!"

Alan Riding is the European cultural correspondent of The Times and a co-author of "The Essential Shakespeare Handbook."
###

Can't make this up

Juliet Binoche, right, sans make-up. My sisters are even more beautiful - also without make-up. And so were my mother and her mother. Photos to be posted soon. You decide.



I was blessed, being raised in a home with four of the loveliest sisters, mother and grandmother in the world. None of them ever needed any make up at all to look beautiful. Now, the rest of the world is catching on. Enjoy.

May 25, 2006
Skin Deep
Sans Makeup, S'il Vous Plaît
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
PARIS

CHIC French women don't wear makeup. At least they pretend not to.

Their goal is to glow, with invisible pores and highly polished skin. Too much makeup, French women say, makes a woman seem older, or even worse, as if she makes a living walking the streets.

"It really astonishes me the way American women wear so much makeup," said Laura Mercier, the French creator of a line of cosmetics and skin care who lives in New York. "In America, even teenage girls are overly made-up. And when you are overly made-up, you send out the message that you are overly sexual, that you want to be visible to attract men."

By contrast, Ms. Mercier said: "French women are not flashy. They must be subtle. The message must not be, 'I'm spending hours on my face to look beautiful.' "

Michèle Fitoussi, one of France's leading social commentators and a columnist at French Elle magazine, described the painted-doll look preferred by many American women with one word: "vulgaire."

Certainly, the French delight in defining themselves in opposition to America, no matter what the topic — food, wine, diplomacy, even beauty. But this attitude is complicated — a blend of chauvinism and fascination, perhaps with a touch of envy. The French admire the Americans, even as they criticize and dismiss them.

A recent issue of French Elle poked fun at what it called the "too much" look of the "California Beauty," illustrated by a model in a shocking pink shirt, bicycle shorts, an orange print scarf, mirrored sunglasses, a Louis Vuitton handbag and gaudy gold high-heeled sandals, earrings, necklaces, chain belt, bangles and rings.

Nicole Richie and Britney Spears have that overdone look, the French say. Madonna is forgiven since she is seen as a hard-nosed businesswoman and free spirit. Jennifer Lopez doesn't count because she is Hispanic and therefore culturally more exotic.

But this disdain is aimed less at specific women than at the overall overdone look.

This season, the unadorned look is more in vogue than ever in France. The weekly magazine L'Express calls it "Le no makeup" look. French Elle described it this month as "Le bare face," defined as "nude skin, shimmering slightly."

To women in France, the too-made-up look represents something more profound than simply one's taste in skin care. It is also the mark of the desperate housewife type who tries too hard.

"The most beautiful makeup for a woman is passion" is the famous quotation of the designer Yves Saint Laurent. "But cosmetics are easier to buy."

Indeed, at the first "beauty cafe" in Paris, the talk is about respect, not transformation. For two hours on four recent evenings, the Columbus Café — a rival of Starbucks — transformed the second floor of its outlet near the Bastille into a place where women came for free lessons about skin care.

"Today beauty is not something only on the surface," Sandra Renzi, a cosmetologist with the Darphin skin care line, lectured to women over coffee and Perrier one evening. "It also comes from inside. Essential oils that contain tiny molecules that penetrate your skin must come first."

At another session, Sylvie Dutour, a cosmetologist with the Bourjois line, revealed how to respect the eyebrow line and the importance of a lipstick-free mouth if the eyes are shadowed and lined with color.

Even for Olivia Hollert, a 22-year-old nurse who considers herself a makeup fanatic, Americans overdo it.

"American girls worship the cult of the 'ideal woman,' " she said. "No part of the face seems to be forgotten. And when you use too much makeup, it means you are hiding from yourself."

In a 2004 poll by the market research group Mintel, 64 percent of American women said they sometimes use foundation, compared with 47 percent of French women; 81 percent of Americans use lipstick compared with 70 percent of French women and 59 percent of Americans use blusher, compared with 43 percent.

The image du jour of "le no makeup" look is Audrey Tautou. One cover of French Elle this month featured Ms. Tautou, 29, the star of "The Da Vinci Code," without jewelry or any visible makeup except for a slight tint on her lips. Even her beauty marks have not been airbrushed away.

Inside the magazine, a full-page photo of her in a frizzy black wig with blackened eyes and red satin cocktail dress bears the caption, "The Fiancée of Frankenstein."

The French actresses Juliette Binoche and Nathalie Baye are regularly featured in magazines for embracing the natural look.

In politics, the Socialist lawmaker Ségolène Royal is busily seducing the country in part because of her grass-roots style, broad smile and fresh-faced look. In some polls on next year's presidential election, she leads the competition.

Ms. Royal, 52, who is portrayed as a young politician, wears almost no makeup and brushes her shoulder-length hair often.

When she had an upper tooth straightened last year, the daily newspaper Libération labeled it an un-French act. "The French people's favorite Socialist is now endowed with an American smile," Libération wrote.

That may be because French women still lag far behind Americans in cosmetic surgery and sundry injections to make them appear less flawed (although they are catching up).

Catherine Deneuve, for example, with her apparent facial interventions and painted face, is sometimes seen as an object of pity. Ms. Deneuve, 62, the icily beautiful star of "Belle de Jour," was once considered so perfect that she was named France's "Marianne," the idealized embodiment of the French Republic. The face of Chanel in the 1970's, she recently was named the face of MAC's Icon cosmetics line. She admits to wearing makeup even when gardening.

"Poor Catherine," said Terry de Gunzburg, creator of the By Terry makeup line. "She let herself get hooked by the syndrome of Dorian Gray, of eternal youth. It's sad."

On the whole, French women like to portray themselves as more balanced, more inclined to pamper themselves and take pleasure in daily rituals than Americans. In its most extreme, America is seen as a youth-obsessed, throwaway, quick-fix culture where women are more likely to look artificially young and totally "done."

According to this view, sexuality has to be subtle. "There's always a rapport with the erotic but it's hidden," Ms. Fitoussi said. "The French love mystery, the game of seduction. That's why we respect perfume, why lingerie is so important."

(A poll in 2003 concluded that 87 percent of French men and women believe that lingerie is an important part of life.)

For Ms. Fitoussi, who wears glasses and little makeup, it's all about choosing. Made-up eyes means wearing neutral lipstick. Red lipstick means dressing in black. "Makeup dates you," she said. "Like a tree."

Instead, French women invest more time aiming for perfect, blemish-free skin. If there is an obsession, it is tight pores. Even French women of modest means are much more likely than American women to get treatments in spas or clinics that scrub, polish, buff, massage and cream their skins.

The French government is complicit. Any woman who can claim to have a medically diagnosed skin condition, from eczema to acne, can receive a regimented "thermal cure" at spas in France once a year. The French taxpayer covers as much as 65 percent of the cost.

Not everyone agrees that the French emphasis on restraint translates into chic and beautiful women.

"In France, women think they know better than others," Ms. de Gunzburg said. "There is a self-sufficiency, an attitude of 'I don't give a damn what you're telling me.'

"Tell me who's chic here in France? Give me one example. Women don't make any effort here."

Frenchmen, meanwhile, (who are getting their faces creamed and polished more often) are quick to say they don't like women whose skin color rubs off on their clothes or who look as if they have smeared their lips with tinted Vaseline.

That sentiment is not new. The narrator of Marcel Proust's 1927 novel, "Finding Time Again," makes the obviously painted and powdered Gilberte a bit pathetic.

"I sensed that, despite myself, I was staring at her in my curiosity to discover what it was about her that was so changed," the narrator says. "This curiosity was, however, soon satisfied when she wiped her nose, despite all the precautions she employed. From all the colors which remained on the handkerchief, turning it into a rich palette, I saw that she was entirely made-up."

Maïa de La Baume contributed reporting for this article.
###

Wildlife Habitat?

Any plan to increase wildlife habitat is ok by me. No apologies. Enjoy.

The New York Times
May 23, 2006
Home on the Range: A Corridor for Wildlife
By CORNELIA DEAN

LAKE LOUISE, Alberta — One day in April, a zoologist named Paul Paquet found himself at the tiny railroad station here, in the middle of Banff National Park. Above him loomed the snow-covered crags of the Canadian Rockies, fringed with Douglas fir and lodgepole pine. A few dozen yards away, the Bow River glimmered in the sun.

He surveyed his surroundings and grimaced. "This park," he said. "It's a national disgrace."

Sure it's beautiful, he said, and, yes, it is one of the last places where grizzly bears can roam and wolves can hunt the elk and bighorn sheep that are their prey. "But there is a highway through the middle of the park, and development associated with it," he said. As a natural environment, "it's a disaster."

Dr. Paquet, who works for the World Wildlife Fund and has faculty appointments at several Canadian universities, is part of a collaborative group of researchers, conservationists, government officials and others hoping to improve things — not by removing roads or railways but by mitigating their effects.

They want to create a sustainable environment for wildlife from the Yukon to Yellowstone, even as people move ever deeper into the Rocky Mountains of the United States and Canada.

Participants in the collaboration, called Y2Y, have designed and monitored overpasses and underpasses to help animals cross highways safely. They have negotiated limits on access to golf courses and ski slopes so animals can traverse them. They have encouraged the creation of wildlife corridors around or even across towns.

Their goal is not just a wolf pack surviving here and there, or a few scattered grizzly bears or elk or bighorn sheep, but a landscape in which animals can thrive, roaming and reproducing widely and avoiding the genetic perils of small populations trapped in shrinking habitats.

When the researchers write up their findings for scientific journals, they call this goal "functional connectivity," said Michael Proctor, a zoologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alberta. He calls it "sex across the highway."

Around the world, conservationists are embarking on similar efforts. In India, wildlife experts are trying to establish corridors linking fragments of tiger habitat, according to the National Wildlife Federation. Similar projects are under way in Costa Rica and Australia.

Researchers at the University of Florida, working in an experimental landscape in South Carolina, reported last year that corridors established for wildlife can also help the survival of plants.

But Y2Y is perhaps the largest effort.

Dr. Proctor, Dr. Paquet and other scientists were at the Lake Louise station because the Canadian Pacific rail line that carries grain to ports on the west coast is a major killing ground for elk, bears and other animals drawn to the tracks by grain that spills from the hoppers

There are arguments over who is responsible for the problem, said Mike Gibeau, as he bent to gather lentils, barley and other grain lying in small piles between the tracks. Dr. Gibeau, who works for Parks Canada, the agency that runs the national parks, is working with other researchers for ways to reduce the carnage.

Here in Lake Louise, the tracks have been fenced off with metal mesh. Where the fence opens at the station, the rail bed has been fitted with a mat of six-inch metal spikes. Trains can pass over the spikes but, in theory, animals cannot.

"We're going to see if it works," Dr. Gibeau said, and if it does it will be adopted elsewhere.

Mesh fencing has also been installed along stretches of the Trans-Canada Highway as it slices across the park, and as the road is widened additional fencing will be added. The effort is motivated not so much by concern for animals, the researchers note, but to avoid injury to the drivers of cars and trucks that would otherwise hit them. In fenced areas, hardly any animals die on the road, but they are trapped on one side or the other.

A project a few miles south of Banff aims to correct that. There, an overpass about 50 yards wide over four lanes of traffic was built a few years ago. Researchers supported by Y2Y are studying what animals are using it and when, in hopes of installing similar crossovers elsewhere.

Approached from the woods, the crossover resembles any other sloping hill, covered with brushy grass, shrubs, saplings and even a clump or two of pussy willow.

Earthen berms on either side hide the road and mute the noise of the tens of thousands of cars that pass by daily, winter and summer.

Animals have worn a trail along one edge and, at the top, leave prints on a cleared stretch of dirt, a so-called track pad, monitored by motion-sensitive cameras with night-vision lenses.

Wayne Hallstrom, a research associate with Parks Canada, said he and his colleagues checked the pad twice a week for signs of animal crossings. In the last few years, he said, they have counted tens of thousands of crossings by wolves, bears, cougars, elk, deer and other animals. Each year the numbers rise, presumably because more animals are learning where the crossings are.

He said researchers planned next to install a bit of barbed wire in hopes of snagging bits of fur with hair follicles that will yield DNA for testing. They want to know not just how many times bears cross the road, say, but whether there are many bears or just a few bears making multiple trips.

"I think it's changed the movement of the elk," Mr. Hallstrom offered, "but it's unstudied so far."

The overpass project is run by Anthony P. Clevenger, a scientist supported by Y2Y who works with the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University at Bozeman. Dr. Clevenger is working on installing dozens of wildlife crossings on Route 93 in Montana, south of Flathead Lake.

"We know that some species — grizzly bears, wolves, elk and deer, also moose, prefer large structures," Dr. Clevenger said. "Cougars and black bears prefer the opposite — very constricted structures with lots of cover." Sometimes a pack of wolves will approach a crossing, but if only some are willing to chance it the pack as a whole may not cross. The scientists are trying to figure out a crossing design that will encourage packs to move en masse.

Dr. Proctor said there was also talk of modifying avalanche sheds that carry cascading snow across mountain highways so animals can use them as crossovers. Y2Y began in the mid-1990's when some Canadian parks officials and conservationists approached the Kendall Foundation, an environmental grant-maker based in Boston. "They said they had this idea of protecting the wild heart of North America from Yellowstone to Yukon," said Gary Tabor, who was at the foundation at the time and later became the first director of Y2Y.

The protection offered by national, state and provincial parks was not enough to protect their bears and elk and wolves, Dr. Tabor said they told him. "They said, 'You have to protect larger landscapes to protect such species.' "

Eventually, Dr. Tabor said, the foundation convened meetings with academic researchers, conservation groups, government agencies and "key stakeholders," like business leaders and American Indian representatives. They discussed what the Y2Y boundaries should be, settling on a region of about 465,000 square miles, most at elevations of 3,500 feet or higher, encircled at lower elevations by prairie grasslands.

They also talked about what kind of scientific work the organization should finance. Today, Y2Y receives grants from foundations and itself supports the work of established scientists, graduate students and others with an annual budget of about $2 million. (An exhibition on the initiative will open July 15 at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, where it will run until January.)

Initially, Dr. Tabor said, property rights organizations and other groups accused Y2Y participants of seeking to drive people out of the Rockies. "That was never the intention," said Dr. Tabor, who left Y2Y in April to head the North America program for the Wildlife Conservation Society. "The intention was, We have to have a regime where people and wildlife can live compatibly." Although parks and other protected areas form the core of Y2Y, "we work community by community," he said.

"It's not just public lands; it's about private lands in between," he added.

When people objected that restrictions would harm the region's economy, Y2Y pointed to a study showing that a pristine environment could draw people who come to the area because of its ecological integrity, the so-called amenity migrants, said Rob Buffler, who replaced Dr. Tabor as Y2Y's chief.

One of the towns drawing them is Canmore, not only because of its beautiful location in the Bow River Valley, but also because it is within commuting distance of Calgary, thriving in Alberta's oil and gas boom, and Banff.

The growing town, which the researchers call "the Canmore plug," has forced animals that once traveled along the river up the mountain slopes, Dr. Gibeau said.

To accommodate them, he said, some ski resorts and golf courses are limiting access to people.

"Grizzly bears come down here to walk down the road in the middle of the night," he said. In April, Parks Canada appealed to drivers to use one major road, the Bow Valley Parkway, only from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. until June 25, to create traffic-free periods for wildlife on the move in spring.

But the human species does not always embrace all of Y2Y's goals. Hikers camp in wildlife underpasses. Mountain bikers drive animals away from an overpass built over a hydroelectric plant canal, Dr. Gibeau said, and they ruin hillside vegetation by riding their brakes too hard on the way down.

Such problems sometimes leave the researchers wondering whether their efforts do any good. Dr. Paquet said it was troubling to think that he might simply be "monitoring the slow demise" of the ecosystem.

Dr. Gibeau carries in his wallet a much-folded piece of paper with words the naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote more than 30 years ago: "One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds," Leopold wrote. "Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well — and does not want to be told otherwise."

Dr. Gibeau has this "ecological education," and he knows Leopold was right.

"People who come here are just so awestruck by the scenery that they cannot understand its ecological problems" he said. "They say, 'How can there be trouble here?' But once you peel back the veneer, this place is like most other places, a human-dominated system."
###