What to Do with a Finger Bowl
In 1957, while I was at Castilleja High School, I met another one of those icon girls, Sue Good. She was a year ahead of me and was one of the main reasons I decided to go to Finch College in New York. Sue had the disciplined ballet-trained body, the ingratiating personality, the requisite blonde hair, and the good report cards. When I found out that Finch was her choice for higher learning, I thought it would probably be a good idea for me, too. I was still plodding behind the blonde Barbie dolls.
The truth is that I didn't particularly want to go to college, but I did want to live in New York City for a while. Asking my parents for twenty thousand dollars to hang out and play in a city three thousand miles from home was a request that definitely wouldn't work, so I presented Finch as a more appropriate option. They went for it.
Although it didn't bill itself as such, Finch was a finishing school for girls from wealthy or prominent families, who went there (if they didn't have the grades to get into Vassar) to learn the basics of how to get and keep a Yale or Harvard man. Not that I was interested in that. My freshman class was made up of women like Sandy Seagram (yup, the booze family), three or four Oklahoma oil heiresses, my roommate, whose father was an Estée Lauder CEO, Cece Shane, who was a rich girl from Beverly Hills, and several more up-and-coming socialite types.
One of the first boys I dated in college was a Princeton boy, Andrew Mathison. No group of people is better at polite disdain and unwarranted contempt than the wealthy old East Coast WASPs. In fact, they're so proud of their lineage as the “earliest settlers,” they refuse to acknowledge that most of the Plymouth Rockers were actually a bunch of malcontents and thugs who sailed over here to escape ridicule and prison back in Europe. My mother was eligible for the DAR, because somebody or other in her bloodline had made the Mayflower boat trip. But she considered the DAR a pretentious group of effete snobs who didn't have the courage to go farther west than Connecticut.
Ouch.
Even in the face of that sound information, I managed to go out with Andrew, who came from one of those East Coast genetically incorrect blue-blood families. He was an intelligent boy with buckteeth and a good sense of humor, but I wasn't aware of his lofty ancestry until the seventies, when a woman who was doing some biographical material on me reported that his “people” refused to talk to her about our relationship. His family probably didn't want it known that their bucktoothed scion had banged a rock-and-roll slut. Buckteeth aren't bad in and of themselves, but why, with all that money, didn't his parents slap some braces on their rodent-toothed kid? I'm very grateful to my parents for having my teeth fixed. Otherwise, I would have been the poster child for my own song, “White Rabbit.”
Jimmy Gaither, another Princeton boy whose parents had political and diplomatic affiliations and a fancy four-floor town house on the East Side, was Sue Good's boyfriend and, later, became her husband. The two of them, along with Andrew “Bugs Bunny” Mathison and I, went on a double date one time and made the mistake of staying out all night. No sex, no drugs, just some romping around in the snow in Central Park. But the Finch social police declared our nighttime activities to be a scandalous travesty of the “nice girl” code. They found it necessary to call a closed meeting of teachers and housemothers to vote on our possible expulsion from that immaculate school of etiquette. I still remember the hours of fear, awaiting their verdict.
Thanks to Sue's cherubic persona, the faculty admonished us for our scandalous behavior, but we were allowed to stay in school so that we could continue the strenuous curriculum of studying the social graces. No pun intended. We learned things like:
1. Which fork to use with which course in a seven-course meal. 101
2. What to do with a finger bowl. Don't drink it. 102
3. Sit properly, legs crossed at the ankle, never at the knee. 103
4. Find out, in the most subtle manner possible, the extent of your escort's liquid assets. 104 (This was everyone's major.)
Along with the above meaty courses, some English, history, and drama were thrown in so we could conduct ourselves properly at a formal dinner and string a couple of sentences together without making any glaring grammatical errors. And they wanted us to be able to speak to each other, hoping that we would develop those cherished and fondly remembered friendships that college life is so famous for. But today, I don't even know if any of those “fond friends” are alive or dead, except one person—Celeste Shane, better known as Cece.
In the beginning of a school year, at an afternoon tea—they were big on high tea at Finch—the dorm housemothers gathered us all in the main hall so we could begin building those cherished relationships that would constitute fodder for old-age reminiscence. That was where I met Cece. You know how some people look irreverent even though they seem to be conducting themselves in a normal manner? Cece had that look. She also looked like the tanned, healthy, blonde Southern California girl that was on the cover of my imaginary “How to Do It Right” handbook. Having already been married once to Gene Shacove, the hairdresser on whom the movie Shampoo was based, Cece was one step ahead of most of us in the sophistication department.
She and I hit it off because of our shared sardonic take on the upper-crusty, East Coast social scene that was heavily fortified at Finch. During a Scotch-and-tradition-soaked weekend at Princeton, Cece and I outraged the preppy boys by doing a spontaneous song-and-dance routine that we thought was a harmless bit of fun. They, on the other hand, thought it was completely “unbecoming” and asked us not to return to the campus in the future. The affronting performance consisted of Cece dancing by herself (fully clothed) in the middle of the room—are you shocked yet?—while I sat on the sidelines singing Chaucerian trash to my own guitar accompaniment.
The offending song went as follows:
I love my wife, yes I do, yes I do,
I love her truly,
I love the hole
That she pisses through.
I love her tits, tiddely-its, tiddely-its,
And her nut-brown asshole,
I'd eat her shit—chop, chop, gobble, gobble,
With a wooden spoon.
If one of their male college buddies had offered up that song, they would have just thought it was kind of stupid, but would they have asked him to leave and never come back?
Puh-leeze.
I also knew some other less offensive songs, having learned most of them from listening to records by black folk singers like Stan Wilson, Miriam Makeba, and Odetta. When Odetta was playing in Greenwich Village that year, I performed the sneak-into-her-dressing-room-after-the-show trick. Before she'd returned from the stage, I was already in there, playing one of her backup guitars. Unlike the rock stars of the following decade, she didn't have a gang of roadies dragging people away from her. Quite the opposite. She was alone and seemed genuinely flattered that someone was interested enough to weasel her way to the back of the club.
Since I have a low-end loud voice, I could relate to Odetta's style better than, say, a Joan Baez or a Joni Mitchell reedy soprano. She encouraged my moderate ability and gently warned me that being a musician was sort of a hit-and-miss occupation. But she loved singing and told me that that was what kept her going when the jobs were few and far between. I wouldn't resume playing the guitar until many years later when the music business was no longer a life of hole-in-the-wall one-nighters.
Not that guitar was really my instrument, anyway. I mainly used the piano for songwriting. Occasionally I played it onstage with Airplane or Starship, but for the most part, people who had a better command of the instrument were the ones who played keyboard.