From e.e. to KM

We are so same and lustful
trees cannot be so high
high cannot be so trustful
I am through you goodbye.

Ghost story

Fade in:

A man and a woman in bed – hair disheveled – slowly puff on a single cigarette, passing it back and forth.

Man
I saw a ghost once. In the corridor right outside this bedroom.

Woman
Was he named Casper?

Man
Yeah, that’s a common Danish name. But no, it wasn’t.

Woman
Casper is an American cartoon. He doesn’t exist.

Man
But this one did. It was a dog. He was tethered to a leash, suspended in the air. The leash was a silhouette on the wall.

Woman
Did he bark to you in Danish?

Man
He wasn't trying to communicate. He was brooding; and a mixed-breed.

Woman
Like you.

Man
A bull-dog and a shit-zu.

The woman laughs.

Woman
Bull-shit.

Man
No, it’s true.

Woman
No, that’s what the breed is called.

Man
(Passing the cigarette)
Oh. Are you afraid of ghosts?

Woman
No.
(pregnant pause)
But I’m afraid of people who see ghosts.

She takes a drag from her cigarette and exhales a puffy circle, as if to say toodle-oo.

Fade to black.

Strange Kids with Candy

There are two kinds of parents in this world: those who will buy sugar cereals for their children… and those who deprive their kids of a sugary upbringing in favor of a wholesome one. My mother was the latter parent, to a fault. Every week, my 3 sweet-tooth sisters and I would beg her to buy us Cocoa Pops, Lucky Charms, Trix, or Frosted Flakes. We wanted anything that would leave us fighting for a prize inside and with a mouth full of cavities.

Nancy, my mom, would sooner hook us up to a Kool-Aid drip than succumb to our pressure.

Ours was a “no-sugar” household. Nancy would buy peanut butter only from the health food store (the chunky, pale kind mashed from fresh peanuts the day of purchase). It tasted funky, like a ground-up monkey, we told her. I yearned for the day when I would be a grown-up with the free will to buy Skippy or Jif. Once a month, if we were good little girls – minding our p’s and q’s and not reporting Nancy to Child Protective Services for her sugarfree tyranny – she would let her four daughters share one can of Coca-Cola. In those days, that would average about 1.4 ounces per person. Or 6 baby-dropper size swallows, if you drank it slow and sparingly.

Christy was the oldest, so she got to pour the can of Coke. We’d pick four identical glasses, and as the second oldest, I'd get to choose my glass first. With my pinky finger in the air, I would gingerly set down the glass on our player-piano in the game room. “Hello Dolly” was on permanent loop, as I’d swig my Coke wearing black sunglasses and pretending to play for my rowdy sisters. To set off the brownish-rouge of my cola, I'd wear a fresh coat of my mom’s Chanel red lipstick to look like an adult who knew how to drink her drink. Lipstick on my teeth, I looked like a blind hooker, but I thought I was Stevie Wonder. Or Ray Charles. I enjoyed my Coke like a once-blind person staring at the sun for the first time.

My sisters and I, not used to the sugar, would easily get souped up on our 1-quarter can of Coke. It was like kindergarten, unplugged. Allyson, third in line, would tap dance on top of the pin-ball machine. Jax, the youngest, would get her finger jammed inside the gumball machine fishing for a freebie (too young to realize that the gumballs were there for decoration only), and that somebody had permanently lodged a foreign coin in the machine so that no gumball could pass through it.

My parents, bless their hearts, thought a sugar-free childhood was the best way to ensure our health and happiness. What they didn’t realize was that we snuck in sugar – in massive quantities – when they weren’t looking. Birthday parties were not about friends and swimming pools and presents, they were about cake, ice cream and piñatas full of Skittles. I chose my friends not on the content of their character, but on the sugar content of their breakfast cereals, that I could enjoy the morning after sleepovers. Nicole had the world’s coolest mother who hailed from Communist Czechoslovakia. Isotta was so mesmerized by the plethora of cereal options in the grocery store, she bought them all for her kids who didn’t realize how good they had it, and for me, who’d hug her knees in the kitchen in deep gratitude.

The first 10 years of my life were spent swearing up and down that once I had my own wealth (from being a world-famous ‘Make-up Artist to the Poor’) I would spend my riches on candy, cookies and cupcakes. The three C’s, the basics in life.

Its only fitting that, today, I would chose to live just around the corner from the finest bakery in all of Copenhagen. Every morning I pass by, and find myself fighting a small urge in my belly to buy a sugary confection that I don’t want or need, just because I can, and because it’s finally allowed.

Today, I don’t like soft drinks or Coke. Gumballs, I’ll take em or leave em. But sugar cereals I’ll purchase a few times a year. When I have kids one day, I’ll stop that habit, so that they can enjoy the privilege of being sweet on their own, and experience the cravings of life.

I guess I’m that kind of parent too.

Birds & fishes

As luck would have it, I didn’t have school or work today. So on this balmy afternoon, after washing away my sins and stains at the Laundromat Café around the corner, I curled up with a bowl of risengrød (rice pudding) and Book of Longing (by Leonard Cohen).

In the humdrum of daily life – negotiating a schedule of full-time school and a near-full time job – moments of pristine rest and rumination are rare. I looked down at my bowl of pudding, topped off with a dollop of pure butter collapsing into the cinnamon, and paused to thank the country that taught me how to enjoy it. I eat it like a child sucking on ice cream.

The short poem The Sweetest Little Song floated like a bubble off the page.

“You go your way.
I’ll go your way too.”

My friend, the Danish writer Nils Thorsen, gave me the Book of Longing on my 30th birthday. It was his own copy, making the gift all the more precious. A few of my – or our – favorite pages now have tattered edges. A brown smudge, likely from his two-year-old’s thumb, is streaked across Cohen’s bird on a branch.

“You go your way.”
.........................................................................................................

Leonard Cohen is Canada's national treasure: a raspy-voiced singer/songwriter, and poet slash tortured artist. Every country has 'em. Denmark churns out more than you’d expect for a country of 5 million. The weather is just one cog on an assembly line of national demerits that spits out virtuosos of the written word: Kim Larsen, Jørgen Leth, Søren Ulrik Thomsen, and Mr. Cosmopolitan Benny Andersen, to name a few.

Hidden in their golden words are some answers to the familiar question I’m posed on a near daily basis.

Why did I move to Denmark?

Early on, I turned to glibness for an answer. Yet each response contained a breadcrumb of truth for the discerning listener to catch.

“I’m running from the FBI.”

Which is partially true.

“Being an American is tiring. I needed a break.”

Also true.

“But why Denmark,” they pester me to know.

It’s been said that Danes are a people self-obsessed with their own identity. Not in the grating, Narcissus way, but from a position of raw self-consciousness. Stunned, they ponder why or how anyone would ditch a palm tree-skyline in California for a cigarette-sky 6 months out of the year in Denmark.

What gets these probers every time is my final answer: that I haven’t a clue as to why I’m here. And that, perhaps, the absence of a reason is the reason itself.
..................................................................................................

Outside, I hear a young child squeaking “Moo-ah” to his mother. The sound grows on me. A pack of young ones are exiting a city bus, holding hands in pairs. Each fair-haired child wears a puffy one-piece that looks like a flightsuit. There’s magic in the way they float across the street, bundled up and still in love with the aquarium they were born into.

For anyone that’s been an expatriate and wandered the unknown streets of a distant land, listening, observing, imagining, and not understanding… you know how I feel. Feeling timeless.

That sensation of being a fish-out-of-water. And realizing, that your lungs grow stronger and your skin stays soft. And that you can grow alternative means of breathing and staying alive.

Denmark has developed aquatic mood-lighting to fill interior darkness. Candles cast a nice glow that form strange shadows on the blue wall of my flat. It gets us through the chill of autumn.

On the days when I gasp and long to dive back into the warm Pacific Ocean – and swim among my own kind – I call a friend like Nils. He's offered to breathe for me when I need a break.

It's nice knowing I don’t have to run from my fatigue, or march onward to the next place – or to some unknown amorous agent to distill meaning into my grief. For now, I have risengrød, longing in my heart, and a way to split myself in two. Part American, part fish. I’ll go where the tides takes me.

“You go your way
I’ll go your way too.”

I just may get there later.


(The old life :)

10 Things to do on a lame-ass day

When times get tough, it's helpful to set up a 'plan-of-action' to help get through the day. Perhaps it’s an American tendency of mine to take stock of troubles, then pin-point a methodology for ridding them. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

1. Make a batch of cupcakes.
2. Go for a run – listen to music on iPod (*avoiding Tracy Chapman at all costs).
3. Call 2 friends who like you more than they liked him.
4. Change the bag in your Bosch vacuum cleaner. Pull out all loose change.
5. Watch a Sex & the City episode (*while sipping a Cosmo. Identify w/Carrie only in severe cases.)
6. Eat ½ a cupcake. Feed the second half to the swans at Sortedam Sø.
7. Try to find some taste in it. Be grateful.
8. Read a Leonard Cohen poem. Poke fun at the strange words.
9. Go for a bike ride.
10. Make a list of things to make a list about. Turn into a Powerpoint.

A final option -- in the event the other 10 fail -- would be a last-minute jaunt to Paris. When in doubt, get out of town. Throw your cares away like an old, stale baguette and stand amidst a city of people just as confused as you.

Au revoir.

Fall is in the air. Scarves abound.

New Job… New Semester… Newt Gingrich

I have nothing to say about Newt Gingrich other than the obvious: is he going to run, how’s his hair these days, and will he shake-up the Republican primary?

Moving on…

I’m thrilled to report that I’ve begun a new job at a dynamic Danish TV development company. It’s nestled within a larger reklamebureau (or “advertising agency”) and has developed several credible programs for Danish TV (such as Laudrup Høgh and 2900 Happiness). Thus far, I couldn’t be more content, challenged or inspired in this new position. My title (in Danish) is Projekt Assistant. If you translate that into English, it means: high-ranking person. The K in projekt is a legitimizing letter outside the English language, lending instant credibility. I fall somewhere below the CEO in the chain-of-command (how far below doesn't really matter) .

This job is a striking departure from my activities at university this past year in Denmark. And it’s only mildly, hugely different from the position I held in the Governor’s office. Where my title had “Senior” and “Executive” in it. I know it’s ghastly arrogant (and pathetically wistful) of me to mention that point, but I do so only to make a larger one. A former hang-up on things like title, position and ‘career path’ has been called into question in the week+ that I’ve been a member of the Danish workforce. That is because the Danish office is constructed much more laterally, as opposed to the rigid hierarchies you’ll find in the US or the UK. Assistants will often share the same office as their superiors, and bosses will fetch their own coffee. In Denmark, its okay, even encouraged, to question those in authority. I still find that point quite strange, the fact that... those under me, like my stapler, can snap at me.


It feels like a homecoming, of sorts, back to my creative roots in television. This time around, my “first days” have been no less memorable than when I began in Hollywood, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, out of UCLA's film school. At Fox, my first day saw me tipping too far back in my squeaky office chair, and falling on my derriere – legs splayed – staring at the fax machine I had been instructed to watch. At the Paramount lot, on my first day at Roswell I got to zip around the studio in a golf cart, which was exhilarating until I rounded a corner too fast and entered the camera-shot of an actor performing a monologue on "New York” street. The actor, Al Pacino, stared back at me, daggers in his eyes matching my own shocked stare as I trembled, hiding behind the steering wheel. I was certain my ass was fired.

Somehow, I’ve managed to squeak by those first fretful days which we’ve all experienced in new jobs. Where you feel clueless, moronic and over-dressed. I told Anne Louise after my first day at CO+TV that I felt like the new kid in school. Only someone, by accident, dropped me off in China, and I don’t speak Mandarin. The language barrier has provided another intrigue angle into this struggled I’ve faced, learning the ropes. My ear must tune in to much more Danish than ever before, and at a company of 50, there are only two of us who don’t speak it fluently. Or even, not fluently.

My mother began an exciting, new job a few months ago, and she was ever the ace when I made my tearful phone call home last week. She described feeling lost, confused and hopeless when she first began her job. Her heart would race rapidly every time they asked her to work the cash register.

Even my mother, with her Mensa IQ and her illustrious medical degree, felt lost when she began her part-time gig at The Pottery Barn at Arden Fair Mall.

What a peach, my mom is. So I’m letting her words be a lesson of forgiveness for the idiotic moves I’m destined to make, like when I cheerfully asked the young CFO if he was an intern. If my mother had only known how many cocktails her once-classy daughter would throw back with her new colleagues, just days after that phone call, she would have issued a sterner pep talk.

But again, as I suggested, the "Danish office" is a liberal and open-minded place. Progressive, if you will. And by getting drunk in their company I was making a bold statement: “I belong here.”

Or at the Betty Ford Center. I haven’t decided which one.

The fact that the “Danish Company Party” (where said drinking occurred) often ends in monster hangovers, expensive dry-cleaning bills, minor felonies, Donald Duck tattoos, jail-time and paternity tests, doesn’t make the office any less advanced.

I’ve officially been initiated into the European workforce, but I’ll write the party entry another time. Perhaps if I get bored at work.


(The other Bridget Jones. Not a mentor to young girls everywhere).