Dan Shapiro's Open Salon Blog

What I learned from watching a few dancers

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:02:53 -0500

The Bryce Jordan Center at Penn State is like many modern college basketball arenas. There’s two levels of bleachers, the ubiquitous banners announcing this victory or that, an American flag (in case we forget where we are) and a massive television screen that hovers over all.

It is, in many ways, a shrine to college athletics. And not just any school’s college athletics, but a very particular school. Penn State currently has the largest dues paying alumni organization in the country. It recently boasted a first place in the Wall Street Journal for corporate hiring. Oh yeah, and it recently suffered a stinging child sexual abuse scandal. The scandal originated with a star Defensive Coordinator on the star football team who appears to have been protected by his brethren.

So perhaps it’s fitting that this weekend Penn State’s college students took over the Bryce Jordan Center to stage “Thon” a dance marathon. Dancers are required to dance for 48 hours in a row, without sleeping or sitting down. They do this to raise funds for the Four Diamonds Fund, a charity that gives money for pediatric cancer care.

The THON dancers invited families to attend who’ve suffered through pediatric cancer and over 300 families obliged. There were kids currently in treatment with chemo hair cuts and kids who have been out years. There are even a few who now have kids of their own. All seem grateful for THON.

This is where I come in. I was diagnosed with cancer when I was 20, long before I joined the faculty at Penn State. When I first went to this annual dance marathon three years ago, I figured that well intentioned college students could probably raise 20 or perhaps 30 thousand dollars if they were organized and aggressive. And I felt some pride that my organization was tackling a disease I’ve been so familiar with.

As it turns out, the Penn State students are organized. They are aggressive. They can in the winter out in the intersections, they approach all organizations across the state. They motivate and incentivize and hold mini-thons. They pit the Penn State campuses against one another in competition and the sororities and fraternities and hold special events.

And they take the dancing seriously. On Sunday there were kids hallucinating and crying and at least one who had to be removed by stretcher. They make sure the dancers get food and massages and their medications and entertainment. It’s a serious event.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised with they flipped up the numbers. Penn State students raised over 10 million dollars for pediatric cancer care last weekend. I know some of the kids it will help treat and I couldn't help but think on that massive number.

It can’t take away what happened to those kids at the hands of our predator. It can’t wipe away the shame that hangs over our athletics department. But it does reflect an honest truth about my organization. We are more than one thing. We are the former home of a predator and a cover-up. We are also the home of hardworking, well-intentioned students capable of great generosity and selflessness. We are both. We’re probably like many organizations across the planet. And maybe people too.

Yep, we are more than one thing. We are Penn State.

His daughter discovered his affair by text

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 08:12:20 -0500

Last week, a young friend was sitting in the car, waiting for her father to return from an errand. He’d just gotten a fancy new phone and it sat between the seats. She picked it up and found an intimate text message cleanly written across the screen. A few clicks and there was another. And more. All from a woman other than her mother. She didn’t say a word to him, not yet. She set it down and when they got home she went up to her room where she fell into a premature sleep. The next morning, she told her mother, who’d already had suspicions.

What followed was the sloppy cascade of lies that are the signature of horrible betrayal. He’s out of the house now, living in a condo and in the near future there will be meetings with locksmiths and lawyers, forensic accountants and guidance counselors, and ultimately probably a judge, who will make decisions about money and custody.

None of this is cosmically surprising. We know that all things move through time in the same pattern. Periods of calm, and periods of crisis. Evolutionary biologists call it “punctuated equilibrium”. It’s a fancy way of saying that most species go through thousands of years with no change and then suddenly sprout funky new feathers or teeth or learn to balance upside down. And some survive and many don’t. Crisis. I think this is also true of planets and stars, relationships and countries. Consider the Romans and the British Empire, Genghis Khan’s hoards or Attila the Hun’s minions. Nations rise and fall and eventually change completely. That’s life on our magic orb, right? Calm and crisis.

That said, there are critical windows of development in nations, and planets and individual lives. Times during which key things happen – a tree drives roots down and wide, thick enough to hold it for a century, a baby gets the stimulation it needs for sight and language, or a planet finds that magic sweet spin to balance its gravity so it can orbit a thousand light year or a million.

So this is what worries me about our young friend. She’s in the critical window for intimacy. This is when fundamental ideas about how romantic relationships operate are forged. A key factor -- a prerequisite for love –is a willingness to tolerate vulnerability. It is the root system of the love tree.

Yet, she’s just witnessed a terrible betrayal. How will she ever trust any boy? Her parents, married now more than 20 years, aren’t talking to one another – and even if they were, they can’t express the totality of what went wrong yet, it’s unlikely that they understand it themselves. Instead there’s only the emotional remnants – like trying to understand what a house looked like after a complete bombing. Here’s where we once had a kitchen – and over there, that was our communication style, and here you can see part of our shared interests. The critical thing – she can’t learn from their shared mistakes. She can’t see where they got derailed so she can learn that there are specific things we can do –that we control – that can preserve our relationships.

I’m afraid her only lesson will be that people get unhappy and then they cheat. Or maybe she’ll think that men cheat. And lie. And ultimately, betray. This is a terribly sad message, and one, as someone married an equal length of time, I don’t want her, or my girls to burrow away.

I do know that we grow closer and apart over years. And then again. That shared interests and respect and love and compromise and laughter and passion are important. And that I’m not always good at them, and I can sure point out -- too quickly -- when my wife isn’t up to snuff. And then we listen and readjust and come back together. Calm crisis, calm crisis.

I also know that loving another person and being loved is the nectar of human experience. In Victor Hugo’s words – to love another person is to see the face of God.

Right now, there’s no way for her to see that. Her anguish, and her mothers’ must eclipse the sun.

All she sees now, I’m afraid, is that to love another person is to risk getting your throat stepped on in a text message.

A short, funny conversation w/ Verizon: Animated film

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 13:10:34 -0400

So I recently had 17 conversations with people at Verizon. Most were well intentioned and just trying to do their jobs in a crazy system. But a few of the conversations were less fruitful. I've made a 90 second, animated film about one of the conversations:

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7469463/

kitchen disposal wisdom

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:07:35 -0400

Terry, my wife, and I are on our way to the big box home store. Last year she gave me a home improvement book. In the book, people like me cut perfect circular holes in walls with handsaws for duct-work and installed high voltage solar wind turbines on their own. I could no sooner do this than build you a rocket ship.

My wife’s father was good with tools. You could give Ron a pile of leaves and a ball peen hammer and get back a new deck or those cabinets you wanted in the master bathroom. Give me a tile saw, a pile of tile and a perfect square to lay them down and you wouldn’t get a recognizable pattern on the floor even if I was given all of geological time.

Now she’s complaining about my driving but I’m not listening. I’m actually a very good driver, though I occasionally have premature turnage. I turn too early. I’ve tried thinking about baseball and rare birds but I can’t help it.

We drive into the hot-tub store, one stop too early and I try to fake it, suggesting that maybe we ought to look at hot-tubs but Terry points out that we already have a hot-tub and it works just fine and I suggest it’s never too soon to think about replacing it given the new Oxygenators that self-clean but she’s heard these sorts of creative noises before. I have to navigate the mini-van in a K turn so that we can pull back out into traffic (while she sighs loudly) and into the home store lot which is an awkward sort of live-with-your-screw-up-for-a-while experience.

Our disposal has recently suffered a violent death involving a nail and my wife. This could have been dangerous, a nail travelling at high speeds through the kitchen, but instead, the nail just quietly executed the disposal. How Terry managed to get the nail down into the drain and then turn on the disposal still confuses me but I am told it involved a planting box.

Terry refuses, under most circumstances, to acknowledge any mistakes which drives me batshit nuts. Her father was critical, she has pointed out, and she learned early to defend herself. My parents were more oooey goooey feel-good-about-yourself Free to Be You and Me Our Bodies Ourselves the sixties are over but our kids deserve to feel great kind of people. As a result, I am fully in touch with my flaws and simultaneous grooviness. I would like Terry to apologize for assassinating the disposal but this is as likely as me starring in a Tarantino movie.

As we walk into the vast catacombs of the home store, I clutch a yellow sticky with the model number of the dead disposal. In my pocket, I have photos of how it’s installed so I can show it to the experts. I do not fear asking for directions. In fact, of the two of us, I am far more likely to ask for help than my wife, who feels that she generally knows it all already. She is, in fact, terrifically competent. Annoyingly so. Blindfold her, spin her around in the middle of a new city and she will point in the direction of the city’s major attractions. “That way is the Jefferson Memorial, the National Aquarium is over there, we can hit the Phillip’s Collection on our way to the Smithsonian Air and Space museum if we head Northwest, which is that way.” Bitch.

She takes my hand and pulls me towards minor unseen kitchen appliances, which have their own section and display. Here are disposal dishwasher connection kits, power cord accessory kits, standard mounting gaskets, biocharge cartridge replacements, and a full display of disposal drain outlets in bronze, polished brass, and even chrome. Who knew that disposals were so complex?

This particular section of the store has seen less attention than the paint displays which we walked through to get here. In the paint section there are smiling cardboard cut outs of shlubs painting perfect sunrooms and there’s a white board on a easel advertising free interior painting workshops. In contrast, only a few of the products in this section are labeled and there are some rubber hoses and plumbers putty that appears to belong a few rows over. Unless I need that stuff too?

“Do we need the putty?” I ask Terry.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

But I’m not sure. I sacrifice another hundred masculinity points and go find a skinny man in a bright orange apron who is helping an elderly woman select the right chain saw. Terry waits, holding the model she thinks we need in her hands.

When he’s available I show the photos of our dead disposal. I hold the photo as if showing him a missing child. I anticpate some sympathetic noises, I am, afterall, sharing the death of a loved appliance. But he laughs a barroom laugh and reminds me that putting in a disposal is the easiest thing in the known universe. “Come on, man, my ten year old daughter could put in a disposal!”

“Great! When can she come over?” I ask, but Terry elbows me in my pelvic bone which hurts! and I smile weakly as we head to the registers carrying the new disposal.

I will not, fortunately, have to install the disposal immediately. Terry works at the hospital as a nurse practitioner and she has an afternoon clinic. After the home store we have to pick up Terry’s mammogram results at the Breast Center and then I’m dropping her at the hospital before picking up Alexandra from school and taking her to the orthodontist.

Orthodonture is primitive. All of these wires and glue just to line up teeth that will inevitably start their gradual movement towards one another again. I’m certain that a few thousand years from now archeologists will giggle at our primitive attempts to keep teeth straight. Braces will occupy the same museum booth as Chinese foot binds, African lip stretchers and circumcisers. But I have strict instructions not to offer my opinions on orthodonture to anyone in the waiting room or on the staff. And especially not to use the words circumcision and braces in the same sentence. Ok, I get it. I say.

So we drive to the breast center and I resist making the obvious wisecracks about what else could happen in a breast center. When she gets back in the car, Terry tells me that they want her to come back in six months to get another mammogram no matter what the results, which is standard operating procedure, I understand. We drive down to the hospital while she fumbles with one of her earrings, which keeps leaping from her ear. Before she gets out of the minivan I say, “Hey, try not to kill any other appliances today.”

And she points at me, “No harassing the orthodontist, seriously, do not compare braces to circumcision, got it?” I nod submissively.

As she walks away she glances over her shoulder and struts, just for a moment, swiveling her hips with exaggeration.

Damn, I like that.

In the moment before the world shatters into shards, we’re consumed with disposals, braces, and the soft slope of hips. We bicker with a self-righteous tone about a wrong turn into a hot-tub store or the premature death of a kitchen appliance. And then, in the cosmic game of shoots and ladders, we land on the wrong square and hurl downward, cheeks blown out, eyes tearing.

The next afternoon I would see Terry’s mammogram with its constellations of dangerous stars strewn near and far. I’d see the concern and hear those words again – chemotherapy, radiation, surgery.

I should have enjoyed the banter as I pulled into the hot-tub store, laughed more when the disposal died, welcomed the chance to stand in an orthodontist’s office consumed with the costs of straight white teeth.

But I didn’t. I am not arrogant enough to believe that the universe recognized my need to learn another lesson about maintaining perspective, not spiritual enough to see it as part of some higher power's plan. Instead I just sank to my knees and wished I had embraced those micromoments more, saw them for what they are -- the threads of my life. My good life.

Why our med school may hire a mom

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:06:17 -0400

The economy is showing in Central Pennsylvania where I live. I chair a department in a medical school and it’s a great place to work – but the number of applications we received for an administrative assistant job was disproportionate – there were over fifty applications – virtually all of them women -- and more arrive every day. So I’ve been interviewing many candidates and having to think up criteria to parse down the list. Per policies governing the interview process I never ask about family unless the candidates bring it up themselves, but many do.

In making a hiring decision, I have to think as objectively as I can, but I know I have a bias towards hiring women who are mothers – raising kids now or who have raised them in the past. When I make the final decision in our hiring process I will try to ignore this bias, but here’s why my bias exists -- and why I think mothers make such great employees.

They know how to work hard

They can multi-task

They know that it’s not all about them

They know how to tell demanding people that they will have to wait

They understand the concept of triage

They get that major change and improvement often happens in increments

They’ve done messy jobs -- so they will appreciate this one

They know the value of a little enthusiasm

They value efficient common sense over lore, opinion, and history

They’ve had to function even when tired, hungry, and irritable

They know that if the oxygen masks fall from the ceiling, they have to put theirs on first, and then on the person sitting next them

They appreciate when others help them out

They understand that some people have things to which they cling for no good reason, like a blanket or a bear – or a strange way of doing budgets, and if it isn’t hurting anyone else, we should just leave them alone until they can give it up on their own

They know how to be supportive when first efforts come up lacking

They appreciate the value of routine and structure

They get that whiny people may still have something valuable to contribute, even if they can’t contribute it at the moment

They understand moods and how they relate to snacks and sleep

They are accustomed to thinking of safety first

They know how to protect their people

They know that sometimes people need to fail to “get it”.

And most important:

They can distinguish a real cry from a fake cry