Passover with Poppets

It's Pesach here at the house ,and because of All Of The Things That Conspire Against Me, I have been busy straightening out other people's houses and businesses and things that require bringing forth Order from Chaos.

Interestingly enough the word "Seder" means Order. 

To get to the point where you have Order for the Seder you have about 4 weeks to get your house ready.

I didn't manage to do that in 4 weeks. I actually started about 48 hours before Pesach ( which is the real word for Passover). This is not good. I'm usually much more on top of this but the Things That Conspire were very active this year.

There were no Poppets in my life at this time last year - odd to think about, isn't it? So the little guys were very amused at the sudden spate of ridiculous cleaning and a five hour shopping trip, reported upon by The Most Adventurous Red, who accompanied me on my desperate search for the right gefilte fish jars.  Poppets, at least the ones in my house, don't really seem to have any knowledge of Judaism and while they like to hang around the ritual objects in the house and appreciate that we set things on fire every week, this looked different to them. Some of them wandered around with questions. I couldn't really help them out,since I was trying to compress time and space through frenetic action, so I gave them some books to look at until I was done with the first round of emergency clean up.

The book they started with was the Moss Haggadah which is a beautiful book of art. There were times that observant Jews felt that you couldn't make images of things that were divine, and that included people, because people were divine, but at the same time there is a commandment to beautify the items that you use to fulfill the mitzvot. (Mitzvot means commandment - there are 613 of them so that's a lot of beautifying).

Haggadot ( the plural of Haggadah) were one of the few consistent places in the history of Jewish Visual Arts that were truly reflections of tastes and talent and locality. It was important to make them beautiful and it was heavily influenced by the regions that the calligraphers lived in. The Moss Haggadah is all hand calligraphed by a single artist in that tradition, and it is a wonderful teaching tool for the history of the Haggadot. I thought they might like it.  It belongs to the Boy of the house, because he earned it and it the source of one of my great joys in life when he finds something in it that he thinks is really cool and tells us about it in his out-loud voice.

Question Everything really has a lot of doubt about the whole religion thing and certainly had even more doubts when he noticed me checking the pockets of the coats in the closet for bread crumbs. 

He wondered about all those commandments and why we followed them and why other people didn't and why I was considering vacuuming the keyholes. Since I was in the process of skipping the whole keyhole vacuuming thing I explained to him that there was a whole section of the Haggadah about asking questions and why you should answer questions and taught our children that when they wre old enough to study on their own it was their religious duty to ask questions. So  really, in Judaism that made him the Holiest Poppet of all.  And then I left him to read the whole section while I set the oven on fire. It was on purpose - it's OK.

Question Everything was pretty impressed. Throughout the whole ritual book people were asking questions, and getting answers and disagreeing about the answers, and then asking more questions. He wondered how a religion could function that way, but I was busy reading labels for signs of autolyzed yeast extract to get them out of the cabinets and then scrubbing them down with bleach so I told him to let someone else have a turn with the book. You see very much like Jack Bauer I WAS RUNNING OUT OF TIME!

Violet found a really pretty page that matched her perfectly but it was all Hebrew, so she asked what it was. I explained that it was the 10 plagues, she was standing on the section of the Haggadah where when we read the plagues that Egypt suffered we remove a drop of wine from our glasses and drop them on to the napkin beside us. They were very pretty purple plagues , but Question Everything wanted to know why, so I did take the time to tell him. Even though the Seder celebrates that we were freed from oppression, many Egyptians suffered and died because of the actions of their ruler, and God and the plauges, so for each plague we remove a drop of wine from our glass to reduce our joy and mourn their lives and suffering. We need to remember that what we accomplished came with a cost, and they need to be respected, mourned and remembered too. 

Violet decided that the plagues were still pretty, even if the whole thing was a little creepy and the Drunken Poppet called out from the mantel that it was a terrible waste of wine, but a stern look from Winter, and he apologized. 

Meanwhile, Question Everything had moved on to another book that explained how to get ready for the Holiday by cleaning in a special way, and when he got to the section that explained why I might have wanted to vacuum out the keyholes, he asked me if I was going to Hell if I skipped it. 

I sighed, and told him Jews don't really have a Hell, and besides there's a magic spell at the end that makes everything OK just in case. I had to leave them alone for a bit while we put away all the things that aren't kosher for Pesach and brought up all the things that were. You see every year we clear out all our cabinets and pots and pans and dishes and silverware that touched things that rise, and replace them with pots and pans and dishes and silverware that never touch things that rise. It's like spring cleaning on steroids. And it leads to a lot of jokes about why in hell a desert God would command us to carry six sets of dishes. But of course it's a joke, because the six sets of dishes are not part of the mitzvot, they're what a bunch of Rabbis decided to agree on after they had asked a whole bunch of questions and argued about a whole bunch of answers, and that desert God wasn't talking to them anymore so they just sort of guessed and Voila! six sets of dishes. Someday I'll talk about me and God but today isn't that day, let's just say I'm sure that God didn't ask us to do a bunch of this but I do a whole bunch of this anyway because there are better reasons than "God says so" but they are complicated so it's easier for people to think that's why I do it. 

Well, I shouldn't have left Question Everything along with the rules for leavened versus unleavened things. Leaven is chametz and you have to have a chametz free house before the Seder. So the next thing I know, I walked past the living room and there was Question Everything reading aloud to the Gingerbread. Silly preoccupied me, I didn't think anything of it until I saw that the House Reds had pulled down my How To Run a Jewish Household book.

It seems that he had wondered aloud if

Gingerbread was allowed to stay in the house because she might be chametz. Since I wasn't around they asked Spike to figure it out. Spike corrected the misconception. He's very educated. Gingerbread was a Poppet, not a cookie, so she was fine to stick around.No one was going to be able to ingest her on a bet. 

Except for maybe Cthulu or something like that, and Spike was pretty sure I wouldn't invite Cthulu to the Seder.  Actually, Spike was a little off base there. If Cthulu comes to the door and asks politely to join us I'm supposed to feed him and make him welcome because he's a stranger here and we were once strangers in the land of Egypt. Of course I'm only going to let him in after he promises to behave and tone down the whole causing insanity thing. I'm not obligated to martyr myself for hospitality or anything. So really it's all up to Cthulu, but I digress. I'm sure Question didn't mean to upset her, it was my own fault for leaving them alone with multiple books and no moderator.

They sort of were getting the gist of things now, having split the reading between them, but certainly the ones having the most fun were the Poppets who chose to read the Kosher by Design cookbook. They spent a decent amount of time wondering if you could really have dessert without cake. However since the dessert menu for the Pesach week read " merengue cookies, coconut sorbet, toasted coconut marshmallows, strawberry mousse, chocolate mousse and ice-cream sundaes",  the Pumpkin Spices, Chocos and Coffee Poppets agreed that you weren't really  suffering for desserts during Peasch and you weren't really likely to lose weight during the eight days of the dietary restrictions either. 

Now that they had the gist of things they realized that I was really rather insane trying to get everything that normally took the better part of two weeks accomplished in 24 hours with one full day of regular office work thrown in, and they decided that even if they didn't understand why I felt the need to do it, they would help. They enlisted the aid of the only actively Jewish-like Poppets in the house and began by Kashering the new kitchen that came in recently for Poppetropolis. 

When they were done they waited until I got home from work and helped me with the six hours I had left to set up for the actual seder. 

The Poppets learned alot more about the whole Seder thing then.  And our Orange Brain saved the day - more on that tomorrow.

Distortion

Ok, you may have to bear with me a moment here. I've read a number of things that are connected for me in the last several days that have got me thinking:

Women and men have always caused themselves pain or exposed themselves to danger or dismemberment for beauty. Everytime I wince at the descriptions of the white mask powders that Queen Elizabeth used, I think about the fact that women now insert silicone into themselves for a type of otherwise unattainable beauty. And before anyone lets men off the hook let me just remind people that high heels were originally popular in Europe to make men's calves more shapely and masculine and that in Italy during a period we refer to colloquially as "the Dark Ages" Men wore short tunic and tights to show off their butts. It was a guy who was searching for the fountain of youth in Florida and he wasn't looking to sell it off to L'Oreal.

So in short order I read about Lisa Rinna, I saw a really interesting photo of Brad Pitt where he specifically requested a photographer who uses derrogotype  , I read a number of female movie critics who were trying to find a way to talk about the effects of plastic surgery on the ability of actors to act on film, I saw this review of a series of intentionally altered photographs, I read comments in FARK about how a woman who wrote a blog entry about a French Politician went back to work a couple of days after a c-section, and those people called her a "fatty" ( the blogger not the politician, who actually looks like she could use a sandwich) and quite honestly that blogger looked normal/PTA-mom-not-gross-attractive to me. I will not link to the comments, FARK is not for amateurs and I think that they were posting in a manner that is true to the nature of FARK. I was NOT offended by it but it did get me thinking about the nature of attractiveness used in the media. 

Then my favorite artist was writing about the few extra pounds she put on, and quite honestly I look at her pictures with a certain amount of envy, because she is talented and beautiful and quite frankly thin. Then in a completely unrelated action I had to weigh myself and find that my weight was lower than I thought it was, and certainly lower than I felt, but that didn't help. Then I saw this picture of Kelly McGillis ( a farking brilliant actor) then and now, and thought "wow I wonder if anyone will hire her" and then I saw poor Nikki Cox and went " Oh dear I wonder if any one will hire her?"

It is Nikki and Lisa that stayed in my mind most as I was reading all of the other items. These women are beautiful and while I think Nikki is a gifted comedic actress, I think from everything I've every seen from Lisa Rinna that she's a genuinely nice person. Here they are before they felt that they needed to interfere with their aging process - Lisa, she's the one on the far right, and Nikki. Lisa flat out admits that she went too far and I'm not sure what Nikki was thinking but honestly, I really hope it fades. But what made these women feel that what they were looking at in the mirror needed to be so drastically altered?

But I know. I know the dirty little secret. These women don't see themselves in the mirror, they see parts, and each part is looked at not through their eyes but through the eyes of the people they are trying to get to cast them. It's not about youth or sex or any of those things. Nicole Kidman's forehead is frozen because when she looks in a mirror there are slight lines in it and she can only see those lines, not that they are altering her ability to act. None of the rest of us can see those lines, and unless you are Brad Pitt, you are not allowing anyone to photograph those lines, because you don't have enough power to make people accept them.

 And that's the reality in the U.S. Since only about 2 percent of the people in the world have the right bone structure to look good on film, that leaves the other 98 percent out struggling for "character" roles . Roles, incidentally that they seemed to have stopped writing, both for women and for less than attractive people. The "ordinary best friend" role is played by the brunette pretty person, Jeneane Garafolo is considered the "ugly one" in "The Truth About Cats and Dogs". If she's the measure of ugly on film, I was SOL until I was old enough to play bag lady extras in the background.  

So here's what I am thinking - I don't really know what I look like, but I have learned that I don't see what other people see. My mirror is distorted. I can look regal and ugly and interesting but there is no part of me that ever sees "attractive". Because I see myself the way I must look at an audition. I have no idea what I look like "in life". And trust me I'll never get cast as Juliet, but I was cast as Romeo once. Nowadays I might have a chance at the Nurse. These women all had a chance at Juliet. 

When these actresses look in the mirror, I think they see "how much longer will they let me act?" and then, because they see the nose, or the chin or the lips instead of themselves . . . they change those things. Their view is distorted  so the changes they make are distorted too. 

There is no Linda Hunt or Margaret Hamilton paving the way for character actors who are female and less than beautiful. The only older women we get to see are Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren, and Diane Keaton, who were not exactly normal looking when they started out. Also they get to be old because they've won Oscars and such, and have mad skillz. Do you think we could even find anyone to cast in a remake of Arsenic and Old Lace? 

These women, Nicole, Nikki and Lisa are truly beautiful in every conventional sense of the word, and a large number of the unconventional ones, but they aren't alright with themselves either. I wonder if any of those funhouse mirrors are even capable of being broken. If they are distorted to themselves, how distorted are we?

Sigh. Pass the clown suit, but I think I'll skip the surgery. My starting material isn't the same caliber as theirs so there's a lot more room for error.