I bought plum blossoms
more for the name
than for the color;
I buy lipstick that way, too.
In other words,
if it sounds like a poem,
I'll take it.
In the absence of rain,
we settle for the fresh,
taste of fog.
The tile roof
(our lizard skin)
is ready
for the green
music of summer.
I bought myself
a New York-colored scarf,
gray, with a dash of
fire-engine red.
And, not exactly noisy,
but--you know--
busy.
I wish I knew the name
of that giant fern
that flutters in the breeze,
like Ginger Rogers' gown.
-
She became national officer of a Zionist youth organization called Young Judea. Her job
there was "developing a core of kids who were ready and willing and able to emigrate to
Israel. They had programs to teach Hebrew, etc. "You know, in a sense I was in charge of
propaganda. It was in a so-called good cause, but I was being used to some extent. And
in turn using people. I mean on the whole I don't think much harm was done. It's a little
scary when I think about it now."
At school, it was public high school. "I'm not sure that school is supposed to be anything but discipline(...) There were a couple of really good teachers and I was also starting to I guess define who I am(..) One was an English teacher and he would just read poetry to us. He would just read it, like not say very much, but I really responded to it(..) Just the fact of having somebody say 'Look at this' was wonderful, you know."
In the fifties, you took the Academic course or the Commercial course in high school. If you wanted to go to college, you took Academic. Commercial was for "kids, mostly girls, who were going to be secretaries and married ladies and housewives and all that good stuff." Dottie took Academic, figuring that with a college degree, she would be more knowledgeable and therefore useful to the state of Israel. She graduated in 1955 and then she went to college, Temple University. At the time, for kids, of her "social and ethnic group, especially women, it wasn't a clear-cut thing that you were going to go to college." She was the first woman in her family to attend college, and she paid most of the tuition through a scholarship.
To her family, "the only really acceptable reason why a girl would go to school then, to college, was to become a teacher. And I knew I didn't want to teach, I'm not sure why. Maybe because it was expected. So I majored in English and had a ball, I mean I loved it. I loved the freedom of college, I loved the intellectual atmosphere, I met Richard. Everybody said 'If you meet a guy then it's automatic that you're not going to finish: you're going to quit and get married.' That did not happen. A lot of other stuff happened, but not that."
Richard was this fellow who played jazz piano and went to Temple University. He was an English major because " they would not let him major in music, because he actually said that he wanted to play jazz." When Dottie met him, it was the first semester she was there, and he was in this jazz quintet that won a national competition and was about to go on the Tonight Show, then hosted by Steve Allen, as their prize. Someone said to Dottie, "'That's the guy. He's gonna be on the Steve Allen show...and also he's a great piano player. '" And she went up to him one day when he was playing in the Student Activities Center and started talking to him. "That was it, that was just it(...) He knew, the second we met, we were going to be married forever and ever and that I was the one. He maintained, kind of teasingly, that a lot of the reason he loved me at first was that I was the only nice girl he ever knew who ever said 'fuck'. In the fifties you didn't do that but I learned it from my Zionist friends. Speaking of which, "the Zionism went right down the toilet(...) It was very obvious:(Richard) was a good substitute.
"He was bright and really smart(..) The only thing my parents objected to -knew -was that he was a musician, and they hated that. And they were scared(..) He was Jewish". That was the only thing about him that my parents approved of.(..) Plus, when I met him I was dating a pre-med student. And of course, my sister…I don't know if she was married to a doctor yet but she was certainly getting ready to marry one and she did. And that was the route I was supposed to follow."
Dottie and Richard were on the staff of the Temple University literary magazine, The Stylus. They were both writing. "It wasn't very good, and it was very collegiate and sophomoric... takeoffs on Classical poetry…Richard and I collaborated once on (a sonnet): the first letter of each line, if you read it, spelled out "GOFU CKYO URSE LF." You know, smartass stuff." Allen Ginsberg's Howl had come out a few years earlier and "Ginsberg really touched a nerve for me especially cause no one was writing like that until he started. I didn't necessarily understand it but I knew that it was wonderful..a valuable thing that I got from it was, I tend to take myself too seriously as a poet. And partly, the Henny Youngman poems are an attempt to deal with that(..) You gotta laugh at yourself, you know; life is too short and nothing is that important. I think that's right, nothing is that important. Ginsberg…what he did for the language, nobody your age could appreciated cause you just take it for granted, but freeing stuff up like that, oh my God."
So Dottie and Richard were very influenced by Howl and they decided to put something along those lines in The Stylus. "Now obviously you could never say 'fuck' in print, but we used blanks and even then, the guy who was the faculty advisor to us almost lost his job for letting us do that."
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