My first real job was washing dishes and bussing tables at Russ' Restaurant, where I earned a busboy's wage of $2.65 an hour. At the end of the night, I was supposed to get a ten-percent cut of each waitress' tips, which they would leave for me in a little white paper bag under the time clock. Sometimes a paper bag would only have a quarter and two dimes in it. Other times I might see $1.65 or more. With five waitresses on the floor, I eventually had to complain to the manager, Rod, that I wasn't making minimum wage. He smiled at me and told me that he, too, had started as a busboy at a Russ' restaurant in Holland, Michigan, but he worked hard and didn't complain and look at him now: he drives a Cadillac. He said if I worked hard, I might expect the same.

In other words, he told me to shut the fuck up and get back to my sink full of soggy french fries and greasy water that smelled like thousand island dressing and meat. One time, one of the waitresses came up behind me, slipped her arms under mine to grab my nipples and whisper in my ear: "what would you do if I got naked and climbed into that sink right there?" I looked at the foetid detritus of several dozen house salads and chicken bones floating in the murky, malodorous sludge. "Um. . ." I said, and she cackled and went back out on the floor.

God she scared the crap out of 16-year-old me.

One of my friends ended up regularly fucking her out in the parking lot during their 15-minute breaks. Restaurants are such hornet's nests of sexual depravity. When she cheated on him with another line cook my friend and a buddy got really drunk and broke into his house and tore it apart. They said they would have killed him had he been there. They both got probation.

Do I think the waitresses were stiffing me on the tips? Probably. Most of them were in their forties, supporting both their broken families and their addiction to Basic Ultra Light 100's on the same $2.65 plus tips I was making. Their nametags said things like Mabel and Rita. To their credit, Russ' was a Dutch restaurant whose most loyal customers usually needed to be wheeled in from a nursing home van. While pushing my bus cart around the restaurant I always had to be careful not to knock the tubes out from the various oxygen tank carts that lined the aisles. If most elderly folks on fixed incomes are frugal, you can imagine what old Dutch people are like. Four old Dutchies would each order (on separate checks) a $1.65 cup of ham-n-bean soup, each ask for six packs of saltines, and then each leave a dime and a nickel for a tip. I know all this because I used to clear their tables. Rumor was that the first Russ' restaurant on Chicago Drive in Holland, Michigan had telephones installed in every booth so customers could call the kitchen and order their food directly with the cooks. This was set up so no one would ever have to leave a tip.

Russ' mascot was Russ, a Dutch boy more annoying than the bowl-headed chap on the paintcans, a clog-wearing punk carrying a gigantic burger through the tulips as though it were his reward for sticking his finger in the goddamn dike. I'll never forget one evening in July when the manager pulled me away from my buscart and told me he had a "special duty" for me that evening. He had a big gap between his top front teeth and he smiled when he pulled some red and blue clothes and a pair of wooden shoes from a bag. "Look what I've got," he said with aplomb. "You get to be the Russ tonight!"

I should have walked out right then.

But I was a weak-willed sonofabitch back in those days, scared of a guy named Rod with a clip-on tie and a ten-year-old Cadillac. I put on the pants, the hat, the neckerchief, and the wooden shoes (which were about two sizes too small) and held a giant sign that said, 3-piece chicken dinner, w/ fries & slaw, only $4.99! in front of the restaurant on main street, certain that every girl in my high school was driving by, laughing. People yelled things. Flipped me off. Honked. When it was a slow night and nobody needed any tables bussed, Rod would pull out the Russ costume to remedy it.

To this day, whenever I see someone dressed as a banana or a hotdog, or some woman dressed up like the statue of liberty outside an accountant's office during tax time, I am haunted by the familiar look of quiet desperation in their eyes.

Juniper woke up this morning at 5:20 a.m. Wood woke with a migraine. I can't put into words how annoying it is to have to wake up at 5:20 a.m. because your kid thinks it's a downright bully time to make you read her Runaway Bunny six times in a row, primarily because Mr. Nice Guy has already described it so perfectly:

"so the kid woke up at 5:30 this morning. sometimes she does this. other times she sleeps till 6:30. the raw power of that single 60 minutes is astonishing to me. the hour between 5:30 and 6:30 has such magical attributes that if you sleep during it, you wake up refreshed. if you don't, you wake up feeling like someone has crapped in your mouth."

He then goes on to describe an early-morning Brooklyn encounter nearly as disturbing as that time Juniper and I stumbled across two pantsless homeless guys distracted away from their shopping cart caravans just long enough to reenact the "piggy" scene from Deliverance in the woods of Golden Gate Park. Read it.

I have a new post up at the Blogfathers.

And as long as I'm just linking today, check out shisomama: this lady makes great collages daily, her kid's name is Otis and he has a haircut so hip I tried to explain it to the chick who charges me $70 every couple months to make me look like I perpetually just crawled out of bed. Clearly, this is a blog I was meant to love.

Oh, and I'm cooking up something big for tomorrow hopefully.

This morning I put on an old blue coat that four years ago my supervisors at work told me not to wear because it looked like it had been "purchased at a Goodwill." They were unaware, perhaps, that I believe Goodwill almost universally overprices its garments, and that it was probably purchased at the Salvation Army instead. Besides, before I could say that, they had moved on to telling me to get a haircut.

While standing on the bus this morning I leaned my nose into the bicep of my upstretched arm and smelled an odor in the coat that reminded me of walking past a homeless man. After four wet winters in my San Francisco closet the coat had reverted to its natural state of beautiful thriftstoriness. For some reason this made me feel very happy.

In little more than a month I intend to set aflame two weeks' worth of 15.5/33 Ike Behar shirts that I never want to wear again. And I will let my hair grow long and wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion, and all that jazz.

* * * * *

We had hoped to start this past weekend with a celebration, but it didn't work out that way. After putting an offer on another house last Thursday, we thought we would be in contract by Friday afternoon. Instead, we spent all day Thursday and all day Friday waiting for our realtor to contact us. Turns out she didn't convey our offer as we had asked her to and then she underwent a lame effort to cover up her mistakes, primarily by not returning our phone calls or e-mails. When I finally got in touch with her and confronted her about what happened she told me it was inappropriate for me to "interrogate" her and said she wished "my mother could hear the way" I was speaking to her. She told me I was being disrespectful (this, after being incommunicato for more than 24 hours while our offer was out and then telling us our offer was "foolish") .

I wanted to say, "When I'm being disrespectful, trust me, you'll know it." But I didn't. I was uncharacteristically civil when I fired her first thing Saturday morning.

* * * * *

On Saturday we "ran into" Leah and Simon from a girl and a boy. Self-acknowledged as "baby crazy," Leah is a veteran blogger and one of our readers and Simon is such a good sport he arranged for a secret encounter with Wood and I, despite the fact that if I were him I would hate us. Leah has powerful Utah genes that are propelling her towards parenthood, and reading Sweet Juniper doesn't help much there, I guess. It seems she thinks we make parenting look tolerable. I love that people without kids read this blog, although if I were childless, this blog would make me throw up in my mouth every morning. Either that or I would read it just to make fun of my sappy ass. I know many "parenting" blogs have regular non-parent readers. I sometimes wonder what it is about this blog that makes it interesting to anyone, let alone people who aren't just here to commiserate about shitty sleep schedules and dirty diapers.

* * * * *

Sunday was the gay pride parade, and though it wasn't quite as exciting for us as last year (no surprisingly friendly gay barbarians), it's always great to see how the whole city rolls out the welcome mat and the rainbow flags and so many people celebrate gay culture and gay rights on such a huge scale. It reminds me that this society has been slowly arcing towards greater equality, and that heavy resistance is often a sign of desperation against the inevitable. Pride week always gives me more hope that soon every couple who wants to be married or raise kids together will be able to do so with the same legal rights as any other and that someday all the people out there who think it's any of their business to deny others such rights will be remembered just as we remember those crowds of saps you see in newsreel footage from the 50s being held back by the national guard while they hurl obscenities at little black girls just trying to go to school.

This month's edition of Sweet Juniper's children's books that you wish celebrities would write: The Johnny Cash board book, as promised.



Flickr set here. I modified Walker Evans photographs for most of the backgrounds, and changed the lyrics around a bit to give it a happy ending. Thanks to Her Bad Mother for suggesting Five Feet High and Risin' last month.

Wood braved the crowds of yuppies at the annual Design Within Reach blowout warehouse scratch-n-dent extravaganza in Union City this weekend, and all she got me was this totally awesome shark toy designed by Alexander Calder for a third of its normal price:

Nothing I could write about Calder could justify the reverence I have for his artistic work; growing up I learned quickly to associate his name with those vibrant stabiles that bring so much life to public plazas, particularly La Grande Vitesse in the Grand Rapids, Michigan plaza that bears Calder's name, as well as the giant red Flamingo stabile that sits within Mies van der Rohe's federal plaza in Chicago, and Calder's Bent Propeller that was virtually destroyed in the plaza outside the World Trade Center on 9/11. And then there are his mobiles. The man invented the mobile. That means every nurseling for the last fifty years who has stared up at rotating, bobbing shapes above his crib has Calder to thank for the hours of entertainment. Sartre, in an essay on Calder, wrote that "a mobile is a little private celebration, an object defined by its movement and having no other existence. It is a flower that fades when it ceases to move, a 'pure play of movement' in the sense that we speak of a pure play of light."

Only recently did I learn that Calder began his artistic career by designing toys. In 1927 he designed a series of kinetic toys for the Gould Manufacturing Company of Oshkosh, Wisconsin that in their design bear witness to Calder's mechanical and artistic genius. Most of the toys are pulled by a string, and lurch along in various movements that mimic the movements of the creatures they were designed to represent: a frog, a seal, a skating bear, a kangaroo, a cow, a shark. Calder designed them to be pulled on axles that connected the wheels not at their center but at what are called "eccentric" points. Thus, the frog and the kangaroo hop. The duck bobs like real ducks do. And the shark lurches on its wheels, allowing its tail to shift back and forth like a fish navigating currents. Before embarking on his toymaking career, Calder graduated from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, with a degree in mechanical engineering. One can't help but speculate that this early application of engineering principles to a few deceptively simple toys ultimately led to his intricately balanced and wonderfully playful mobiles.

But there is a clear transition, and it is wonderful to behold: Calder's experimenting with various toy designs led to the development of a complex miniature circus in his studio. Calder had long been fascinated by the circus, and in his twenties he paid his way through art classes by selling a number of illustrations of the Barnum and Bailey's Circus to the National Police Gazette. In the late 1920s, Calder developed his own one-man circus, with tiny performers made of "cork, wire, wood, yarn, paper, string, and cloth," carefully engineered to walk tightropes, dance, tame lions, lift weights, and engage in gymnastics and acrobatics in and above the ring. Acting as omniscient ringmaster, Calder would manipulate the wire performers while his wife wound circus music on the gramophone in the background. While struggling as a more traditional artist in Paris, Calder began two-hour improvised performances of his Cirque Calder that recreated the performance of an actual circus. The show soon became a popular diversion among the Parisian avant-garde, and Calder began charging an entrance fee to see the big-top circus that could be packed into a suitcase. I like to imagine Calder's rented Montmartre studio on some smoky conglomerated pre-War Parisian night, filled with the likes of Jean Cocteau, Picasso, Joan Miro, James Joyce, Fernand Leger, Le Corbusier, Thomas Wolfe, and Andre Kertesz watching the young American perform his wire circus.

As his reputation among the avant-garde grew, Dutch painter Piet Mondrian invited Calder to his studio, and it was there, in viewing a white wall with cardboard rectangles of varying colors tacked on it, that he was inspired to delve into the abstract. He felt the rectangles could be made "to oscillate in different directions, and at different amplitudes." The visit proved to be the "shock that started things," he said later. Within a few months he was making mobiles.

I was writing with greg from daddytypes last week about the Calder toys and Cirque Calder and he mentioned how much he loved Carlos Vilardebo's 1961 film of Calder performing his circus, and I remembered I had it on DVD somewhere in my collection of bootlegs, so I ripped it, converted it, and uploaded it to youtube in four-minute chunks. The video quality on my version was never great, so it's perfect for youtube. It is a remarkable film, not just for the ingenuity of its subject but for the gravity of seeing one of the true geniuses of the 20th century playing circus just like he did when he was an unknown young man:



That's part one. Here's part two; Part three; and Part four. It's a total of 18 minutes or so. My favorite part is when the lion shits and he covers it with sawdust.

Several Calder toys are still being manufactured and are for sale on the internet, including his elephant and cat puzzles, the kangaroo, the bull push toy, and, of course, the shark Juniper is playing with in the picture above. Those are expensive as hell, display pieces more than toys, really. But they are all the evidence I need that a well-engineered toy doesn't have to have microchips in it to be remarkable.