Henny Youngman's
bird imitation
consists of putting on
his new red jacket.
My audience
There they are,
spread out in front of me,
like flowers.
If I wore a kimono,
I could gather them up
in my sleeves.
In vowel rich Balboa
we watched surfers
undulate
like mermaids
in the high tide
while the sunset turned
into a fresh bruise
How to Slurp Like Godzilla
-
This interview was conducted by two UCLA students who were in a "Womans Studies" course.
They met Dottie in 1997, after a poetry reading in Echo Park. It's title, "How to Slurp Like Godzilla" is based on the following poem of Dottie's:
-
The city is a puddle
of sequins at my feet
I want to slurp it
idiotically
like Godzilla
-
Dottie Grossman writes poems, she was born in Philidelphia. Her poems are short. Some of them
are the Henny
Youngman Poems; Henny Youngman who said "Take my wife-please!" on the Borscht Belt. Don't
ignore the other poems. Dottie was born lower middle class, Jewish, in 1937. Kosher household
and
Sabbath observed, low attendance at Temple. Went to Sunday school; was not Bat Mitzvahed,
because it
wasn't a big deal at the time. Was forced to fast on Yom Kippur, Day of Atonement. Mom was "a
high school graduate, which is fairly big deal", father was a salesman, both born in Russia
and came to the United States at young ages. One sibling, four years older. Dottie, sister,
mother and father lived with grandparents above grandfather's used furniture store 'til Dottie
was eight or nine. She spent a lot of time drumming on everything with her hands when she was a
kid.
" I went to kindergarten when we still lived with my grandparents. I didn't like kindergarten. I used to run out, I used to sneak out and run home. My big sister was a model student. To some extent, I think that helped determine and define who I became I did what at that time was called Rebelled Against Authority. Particularly my parents. I would not accept the law as it was laid down by them. And in some ways I paid for it. I was also very happy for it. But I did not get their approval, and that costs you."
One of the things about being kosher is that you can't eat dairy products and meat together, or "you'll go right to hell. Lightning will strike." One day, about thirteen years old, Dottie ate a Philly cheese steak and no lightening. No hell either.
In her high school years, Dottie was "very caught up in the romance" of the newly realized state of Israel. She got into Zionism, which "had all the elements that an idealistic kid would love(...) It was essentially the belief that there should be a state of Israel for the Jews after World War II and after the horrors of that. Anyone who was a Zionist was somebody who worked actively to promote that state". It was also a way to freak out her parents. "There was at that time the threat that I could go to live in Israel and never see them again. Even though they were Jewish and very supportive of the idea of a state, they were not so supportive of losing one of their only kids to it forever(...) And it was also a great outlet because we didn't have drugs then, not middle class or lower class kids. Sex was not for nice Jewish girls(...) I took whatever alternatives were available to me to freak my parents out, which I guess most kids do." She started hanging out with these other Zionists who were "bright, assertive, different from the rest of the kids- they were not into partying and social stuff."