Joe Cillo

OH MY GOD!!!!

Only when we are no longer afraid
Do we begin to live.
Dorothy Thompson

It is always something…and that something terrorizes us.  In Britain, we are all petrified of spiders and the strongest among us get queasy when we look down from a high place. If we are planning suicide, we much prefer to hang ourselves or swallow poison.  It isn’t as scary.

All of us can feel our blood pressure rise when we hear what is happening to the ozone layer even though not one of us have ever seen it or really know what it is.

We were warned that greater exposure to ultra violet rays has caused a rise in melanomas to eat away our skin even as it blinds innocent fish and little bunnies.  Every educated person worries that our deserts are expanding and we are going to dry out if we are not completely cooked by global warming or drowned by the melting glaciers first.  Worse, the air has become so polluted that if anyone dares to take a deep breath these days, he will die. Now it is the Ebola Virus that is seeping in from Africa and will kill every one of us within moments.

What next?

I have lived through it all and I can testify that all of it is smoke and mirrors.  My mother believed that the Russians created the Asian Flu epidemic and I believed she was the cause of all my cavities.  My sister blamed my mother for making her so fat and my mother blamed my father when the car stalled.

All of us are afraid that we won’t have enough money to take care of ourselves until we die and now that we all live longer, we are stashing funds into retirement accounts, under mattresses and behind the furnace just in case we have the bad luck to live to be 110.

The truth is that all the fuss about organic foods is spoiling dinner. I am sorry if the beef I eat was taken from viciously murdered cows and I feel terrible for the spinach soaked in nasty insecticides so it wouldn’t look like green Swiss cheese when it arrived at the table. If am going to worry that the vegetables in my salad had an unhappy childhood or the cream I rub on my face is nothing but wax, I am not going to have time to go dancing.

Hooray for caring about our environment.  Hooray for doing our best to clean up the air and return to real food instead of the genetically modified, tasteless fakes the supermarkets give us.  Hooray, too,  for medical advances that protect us from epidemics.  I believe in doing our best to do our best for ourselves now….and deal with disaster when it happens. If the coward dies 1000 deaths and the hero dies but one, I want to be a hero.

Joe Cillo

www.forallevents.com/

NO, THANK YOU

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life
Is “No thank you,” it will be enough.
Lynn Ruth and Meister Eckhart

No one likes to take responsibility for their own destiny and the American people are a prime example.  They have blamed the car manufacturers for our automobile fatalities, the cigarette manufacturers for lung cancer and now they are blaming dessert creators for our obesity.  It turns out that unsuspecting consumers are not at fault for increasing their circumference faster than the speed of light.  Nor is it their doing that they no longer fit in a revolving door.  The blame is now on those profit-mongering villains who make delectable biscuits, marvelous confections and delicious drinks to quench our thirst. Indeed, these greedy monsters are deliberately adding a ton of sugar to all the goods we adore for the sole purpose of making diabetes our national disease.

The latest scientific studies confirm their corruption.  Sugar is toxic and unscrupulous manufacturers like Sara Lee (yummy cheesecake) or Krispy Kreme Doughnuts have deliberately stuffed their products with this poisonous substance that has been proven to kill us even faster than fatty beef will clog our arteries.

In less informed times, these bakers were our heroes.  We longed for their recipes, gobbled up their products and reveled in the sugar high we got to finish our meal.  We reached blindly for them in the mid-afternoon to pep us up when the “threesies” hit.  Now, thanks to those experts who conduct scientific studies that destroy our confidence in our own preferences, we all know better.  We have been the innocent pushovers of a diabolical plot to put money in the pockets of the obscenely rich manufacturers of cookies, cakes and pies even as we collapse in droves from insulin failure.

The baking industry and the soft drink tycoons are scandalized at the accusations the scientific community has made to smudge their good name and destroy their public image. After all, they say, all they did was create a product that people enjoyed eating. “Don’t talk to me about nutrition,” one reportedly said. “Talk to me about taste, and if this stuff tastes better, don’t run around trying to sell stuff that doesn’t taste good.”

I cannot help but remember my sister who turned to hypnotism to help her when she topped 400 pounds.  “My right hand was hypnotized so it would not touch the refrigerator,” she said.  “So I learned to open it with my left.”

Now, I know perfectly well that it has become politically incorrect to blame the consumer for what he consumes but I cannot help but remember my dear old mother (who wasn’t dear ALL the time but sadly almost always right) when she said.  “If you don’t want it, just say, ‘no thank you.’”

I would love to see a scientific study that figures out why the obese among us are incapable of pushing away that second piece of pie, or turning their noses up and their fifth glass of soda pop.  I suspect that if we could create a no thank you serum to inject into ourselves before dinner, we would save a fortune in diabetic remedies, fat farms and gastric by-passes.  Isn’t funny, how simple solutions seem to escape us?

In the dark ages when I was a child, Gwendolyn Turner and I took my chubby sister to an ice cream parlor and, because we only had thirty-five cents between us, we ordered a chocolate soda with three straws.  My sister, who was the shortest, grabbed her straw and began drinking.  Gwendolyn and I kept bumping heads trying to get to our straws and before we managed to solve this spatial challenge my sister had finished the soda.  Moral: If you want something bad enough, there is always a way to avoid sharing it.

My mother’s family was very poor and ate potatoes almost every night.  Every once in a while, my grandma managed to bake a cake for her 4 daughters and her son, Charlie.  She would cut it into portions, put it on the table and as soon as all four little girls look rapturously at their dessert, my Uncle Charlie would point to the ceiling and shout “LOOK!!!”  When his sisters looked down again at their plates, their cake had disappeared.  Moral: Brothers cannot be trusted any more that the manufacturers of sugar-filled products; scheming monsters every one of them.

Joe Cillo

www.forallevents.com/

NAKED IS AS NAKED DOES

The male body is hairy and lumpy
And should not be seen by the light of day
Richard Roeper

Americans do not mind seeing people murdered on their television screen and they love watching heads flying and limbs severed at the movies.  They like the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire, bodies strewn across the pavement and little children crying for their lost mummies and daddies.   The more violence the better.  That is the American way.

The truth is that violence and tragedy make great entertainment.  So does pornography.  Americans actually prefer to watch lust happening even more than they like doing it. What a thrill to see a man and women tearing each other’s genitals to pieces or whipping and chaining each other for the sheer pleasure of hearing them scream.  Porn is almost as popular in America as violence.  We watch both every day and love it all.

But let some poor schnook walk outside to get the newspaper in the altogether and he ignites public outrage. “It offends me to see anyone that way,” said one insulted observer. “It is disgusting.”

That is why San Francisco decided to compromise its image of freedom of expression and tolerance of the odd-ball and ban public nudity from its streets.  No more can raunchy old men spread a towel on a stone bench and sun themselves in the Castro district.  No more, can its citizens strip to the flesh to bathe in the afternoon sun.  San Francisco now supports the theory that our bodies are so hideous they must be concealed in public.  No matter, that liberated women, forward thinking men and eating disorder specialists are trying to make us comfy with our diverse shapes and sizes.  In San Francisco, it is pc to be ashamed.

Now, it seems that the Japanese, too are offended by nudity, but they have taken it one step further.  They do not want to see representations of the human body, much less the real thing. Michelangelo’s David  was presented to the town of Okuizumo and the inhabitants ran for cover.  “It’s frightening the children and worrying the adults with its nakedness,” said one of the town’s bigwigs.

I can only assume that they have also stripped their museums of reproductions of Van Gogh’s NUDE WOMAN ON A BED or Renoir’s AFER BATHING not to mention Whistler’s shocking NUDE GIRL WITH A BOWL.

Obviously, the very sight of a naked body horrifies the more sensitive among us.   It is difficult to understand why we think the sight of a penis or a breast will frighten our children more than the sight of shattered limbs and battered heads. Will our innocent youth smash the bathroom mirror when one day they see those very banned organs protruding from their own bodies?

The truth is that in America our bodies are considered repulsive and offensive unless we film them and flaunt them on a screen.  The only answer to this dilemma is to cover every baby at birth with ornamental tattoos so that as they mature, no one will recognize the new growth.  And everyone will be amazed when it rises to an occasion.

I don’t even like to be naked
In front of myself!
Camryn Manheim

Joe Cillo

www.forallevents.com/

THE BORING GENERATION

Virtually everything people believe in
can be exposed as possessing laughable inconsistencies.
And so they laugh. And stand still
Scott Turow

It seems that people born after 1980 don’t like to party. Radio 4 has labeled them “Generation Right” because they are not interested in bar-hopping, binge-drinking and cocaine.   Instead, they prefer to stay at home and knit. I can hardly blame them.

I am from the Silent Generation. We endured The Depression, World War II, Korea, the atom bomb, the Cold War and held tight to our own values and comfortable life styles.  Generation Y has observed the things we thought were holy and asked, ”Really?  Is marriage that great?  Do we need to believe in God?  Is your work your whole life? Is it all about sex? What is really important?”

I think that is a very good thing.  The truth is that the outside world puzzled me, too.  It was knitting that gave me perspective. A ball of yarn and two needles was all it took to lower my blood pressure and absorb me in something besides what everyone thought of me and what we were having for dinner.

I was ten years old.

My Aunt Hazel and my mother were arguing about me.  “She sits in the closet reading a book a day,” said my mother.  “Her room is a mess and I cannot get her to set the table.”

My aunt who adored me because when she fed me dinner she never had leftovers, rushed to my defense.  “She needs a hobby,” she told my mother.

She opened the closet door and closed my book.  “You have a disgusting pallor from sitting in here all day reading about other people’s lives.    I am going to teach you how to live your own.  I am going to teach you to knit.”

“What does that have to do with life?” I asked.

“Everything,” said Aunt Hazel and took me to the yarn shop. My first project was a green scarf. Endless scarves, mittens, hats, argyle socks, suits, skirts, dresses and coats followed as the world bucked and bolted, climates changed, morals were destroyed, the definition of male and female blurred, test tubes created babies and modified vegetables, single was not a death sentence and marriage was not forever. I believe it was the click of the needles and the transformation of yarn into garments that kept me sane through all that chaos.

Generations that followed turned to medication to help them cope, but Generation Y got smart. It has seen the world fight for women’s rights, gay rights, diversity, environmental preservation, and abolition of war and thought ”What a waste of energy!”

And that’s why it stays home and knits.  Just like me.

Joe Cillo

www.forallevents.com/

MODESTY

Modest:  the art of enhancing your charm
By pretending not to be aware of it.
Oliver Herford

French women have decided they get a lot more mileage out of a loose filmy caftan than a bared breast.  More and more French women have refused to go topless and I know why.  They have learned the power of suggestion is far stronger than reality.  It is not what you see that will excite the object of your affections; it is what he HOPES he will see.

I learned this lesson years ago in the early fifties when girls covered up or else they were expelled from schools, barred from restaurants and hidden in the back seat of the convertible.  At that time, my female hormones whipped into a frenzy and erupted into wild desire at anything male including the dog.  My first impulse on seeing a man was to rip off my clothes and say “Here I am” in as sultry a tone as I could muster.

However Mother Nature had not been kind to me.  I was so skinny I resembled a sanded post and there were very few hints of curves or indentations on my form.  I knew all too well that nudity was not my strong suit.  That was when I discovered saggy blue jeans and my father’s shirts.

Other young ladies of the times wandered around in sweaters that told it all and jeans so tight they had to skip when they walked.  When you saw them, you saw it all.  There were no surprises in the bedroom or even when you were groped behind the oak tree in their front yard.  There it was:  just like that apple Adam could not resist.

In those days, I dressed to hide what I lacked and I draped myself in loose jeans that suggested the possibility of a plump bottom and my father’s over-sized shorts that hinted at a bosom that was not there.  The result was that I had hordes of men following me, trying to get into those jeans  and I do not want to discuss how many times I intercepted a hand about to plunge down my shirt to get a grip on a fantasy.

Indeed, I was a huge social success until the big reveal and the inevitable disappointment that followed,  But this was the fifties when that reveal didn’t happen until you got the ring, the china, silver and the pretty white dress.  By that time, it was too late.

Now I am well into my dotage.  My body has descended into my shoes.  My wrinkles, sags and bags resemble a discarded sponge and my legs are so splotched they look like tubular Kandinsky paintings.  Once again, I am faced with doing a bit of concealing if I want to tempt anyone into taking me out for dinner.  I wear filmy tops and flowing feathered gowns with glittery spangles to redirect the eyes of the beholders from my sagging chest and bony ankles to the colorful glitz that hides them. The result is that I have not paid for a glass of wine in ten years.  French women have caught on to my secret and I am sharing it with you.  Never ever give anything away until the money is in the bank…so to speak.

Joe Cillo

www.forallevents.com/

KNIT ONE, PURL TWO AND YOU’RE FREE

Properly practiced, knitting soothes the troubled spirit,
and it doesn’t hurt the untroubled spirit either.
Elizabeth Zimmerman

I was a nervous child.  I was terrified of the horrible dangers that lurked around every corner.  If I talked to strangers because they would abduct me; I must never argue with my mother or she would give me back to the Indians.  I couldn’t cross a street without risking my life; if I dared to boil water, the steam would blind me.  Touching the pan would cost a finger. Boys with nasty leers jumped out behind bushes at little girls like me, and teachers got angry for no reason at all.

Reality was too much for me to absorb.  My nerves were jangled and my nails bitten to the quick.  I jumped at an unexpected sound; I screamed when a light flashed; I hid under the couch when someone slammed the door.

My mother was a redhead with an attitude.  She was afraid of nothing. Danger actually thrilled her and she met it head on with eyes flashing and acid repartee that quelled the bravest among us.

And it was she who made me quiver and shake at the thought of facing another day with all its pitfalls.  It was she who reminded me that I might trip if I ran too fast; I might break that dish I was wiping; or jam the brush into my eye when I brushed my hair.  She couldn’t stand the fidgeting, the nail biting, and the twitches.  “This kid is driving me crazy,” she told my Aunt Hazel.  “She is a nervous wreck.”

My Aunt Hazel was a pragmatist.  When she didn’t get enough meat for dinner, she left home.  When she couldn’t earn enough money to support herself she married a bootlegger.  She was one of the first in that generation to think outside the box.  “Teach her to knit,” she told my mother.

“Are you crazy?” said my mother.  “She jiggles so much she’ll poke her eyes out with a knitting needled. “

“Well that’s one way to calm her down,” said Aunt Hazel.

So it was that my aunt took me with her to the Stitch In Time Knitting shop filled with yarn in every color and an oval table piled high with pattern books. Several ladies sat around that table drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes (this was 1943) chatting about the war effort and knitting scarves, mittens and caps for our servicemen.  Their needles clicked and they smiled and laughed as they worked.  As I watched these women moving those needles at the speed of light, I saw to my amazement that they were creating all kinds of garments: sweaters with lace sleeves, block patterns and colors, plaids and stripes and polka dots.

“I want to do that,” I told my aunt.

“I thought you would,” she said.  “What would you like to make?”

My aunt took me home that afternoon and told my mother, ”She’s knitting a scarf.  That will keep her in line.”

That was back in 1943, but my aunt’s wisdom holds truth even today.  In fact, a maximum-security prison in Brazil came to the same conclusion.  They have decided that if their inmates knit something for three days, it is worth one day off their sentence.  They know what my aunt figured out so many years ago.  Knitters don’t have time to get in trouble.  They might drop a stitch.

Joe Cillo

www.forallevents.com/