A Barney's window display of Lady Gaga's work has legendary multi-media performance artist Colette's notorious creations written all over it.

Colette, whose seminal performance art and multi-media installations originated out of New York City's vibrant art scene in the 1970's has traveled to museums and galleries all over the world; including the Guggenheim; MOMA; and The Whitney.

Upon seeing Barney's Lady Gaga window display in midtown, Colette takes to the streets in protest to send a clear message to the Gaga camp that Colette is standing outside the door and must be invited in and given proper respect.

What bothers me is when they leave and I see their tip.

Hordes of European and South American tourists come through the restaurant and leave paltry tips or none at all, unless we add it to their bills. Just last week a family of eight from Colombia spent a hundred and twenty dollars on dinner and left a ten dollar tip. They waved at me when they left, thinking we were best friends because I spoke to them in Spanish, have a friend living in their hometown and plan on traveling to their country soon. I felt bad for resenting them, but it was a slow night and I needed all the tips I could get.

It’s not their fault they’re unfamiliar with our tipping system. They don’t know that, as a waitress, my hourly wage is less than the Mexican dishwasher’s. But fortunately it’s not the restaurant that pays most our check—it’s the customers and their tips.

The West Village restaurant I’ve been working at for four months serves Balkan and Mediterranean cuisine. We also have a wine bar, and though we do have wine from Italy, France, and Spain, many of the regulars come here to try our wine from the Balkans—stuff they can’t really find at other restaurants. But the French are different. They come here to drink Bordeaux.

On slow nights we pass out wine coupons. A customer with a coupon gets a free glass of our house wine. Usually when people get free wine, they feel inclined to order food, drink more wine, or at least leave a cash tip. It’s because of the coupons that a young French couple ended up at the bar.

Though they finish their glasses of our house red—a Pinot Noir from Italy, they make it known that it had not met their expectations. It is not my favorite either, but I’ve never complained about a free glass of wine. At least our coupon ploy worked because they decided to buy two more glasses of wine, and because they are French they felt entitled to sample over half our wine list.

Most customers, when they dislike a wine, will politely ask to sample something else, but this French couple made a histrionic show of their disapproval. Their lips, which arched and curved gracefully when speaking to each other in French, puckered grotesquely and they vigorously shook their heads at every wine they tried until they finally settled on two glasses of Bordeaux.

“Eet reminds us of home,” they said, and ordered some meats and cheeses to accompany their wine. Their cheeks got rosy as they imbibed and spoke softly. If they were bitching about our wine selection I would not have been able to tell by their tone since the French language seems to be devoid of hard consonants. They could have been comparing the Tempranillo to horse piss and it would have all sounded like docile cooing to me. There are some moments when I almost thought the French couple was cute, but I always managed to recover my senses.

After sipping the same glasses of Bordeaux for two hours they finally requested the bill twenty minutes after we were supposed to close. The man left a tip of one dollar and twenty cents after spending over twenty dollars. He smiled at me as they grabbed their coats to go, as if the experience had been equally endearing for both parties.

A buck twenty? Oh no, buddy. You can keep your smile.

With that smile he is in the same club as the Colombians and numerous other international visitors. The whole herd of them will have grinned and waved their way through countless New York City restaurants by now, blissfully ignorant of the fact that they are a waitress’s worst nightmare. The Colombians were a lost cause, but it was not too late to reach this Frenchman. It was not about the money. It’s not like a bill of twenty-something dollars will ever fetch a large tip. It’s just hard for me to let bygones be bygones.

For my mission to be successful I had to quickly engage the French couple in this small talk before they left, and I had to do it with a smile—though all I really wanted to do is fling a glass of Bordeaux in their faces.

“So, how long have you been here?” I asked, trying to look casual with my elbows on the bar.

“Oh, I hev been here fur a monz,” explains the girl. “I hev an intairnsheep,” she added. “He eez my friend. He eez visiting for a week,” she said of her male companion, who offered another ridiculous smile.

“Okay!” I said, hoping the foreigners would not detect my false enthusiasm. “And how long will you be staying in New York?”

“Fur two more weeks,” replied the guy. I didn’t know about the girl, but estimated that since he was a tourist he would probably eat out every meal, which meant that there were at least forty-two different waitresses he would be shortchanging.

“Hmmm, okay….that’s great!” I gushed, causing the French man to look at me expectantly, perhaps thinking I would tell him some important insider information. Like where all the actors hang out. The girl, on the other hand, had already put her jacket on. That was my cue to hurry up and stop beating around the bush.

For dramatic effect I quickly dropped my smile and peered straight into the Frenchman’s pupils. “Well, since you’ll be here for a while you might as well know that in New York City you are supposed to leave at least a fifteen percent tip.”

I guess my affectations worked because the girl suddenly started to get anxious.

“Ow much did you leave?” She asked her compatriot, her face beet red instead of cute red. In the time that she’d been here she already figured out about gratuity, but it didn’t matter what she knew if she wasn’t paying the bill.

The guy looked at me for an answer. He hadn’t even looked at the bill when he put down his cash.

“You left one dollar and twenty cents,” I said.

Words were exchanged in rapid French. The man blushed. I wish I could have sugar coated this learning experience for him, and perhaps it was bad form to educate him in front of his female companion, but as most Americans know, getting schooled on another country’s dining etiquette while abroad is hardly ever a graceful experience.

Most people react by getting defensive or repeating the obvious. “Well, it’s not like that in my country,” they say before expounding on the virtues of their way of doing things. I waited for the Frenchman’s rebuttal, but never got one.

“I’m sorry, I deed not know,” he said, which surprised me.

The man seemed so genuinely remorseful I felt obliged to dish out some good old American optimism. “Well, it’s okay, because now you know!”

He put two more dollars on the bar, which I did not expect him to do. Now it was my turn to feel remorseful. I decided to appeal to the French’s sense of patriotism in an attempt to uplift his spirits and quell an impending sense of guilt.

“Yeah, things are different in France. In France your waitresses get a wage …and….and…gratuity is included in the bill…” My discourse devolved into babble about living wages, vacation time and health care, until eventually the Frenchman’s smile crept back onto his face before the couple left.

“Good bye! Come back again!” I said out of habit, knowing they wouldn’t.

Robin Kilmer graduated from Bard College in 2007 and worked for three years at a public school in the Bronx. She hopes to one day successfully converge two diametrically opposing forces: writing and making a living. Until that day she is working as a nanny (and a waitress).

She asked if she could talk to me, was pretty, had eyes that were open and interested. Our faces nearly touched. Hers filled my vision completely, as though in an effort to block out all thought of the thriving city around us. She spoke fast. Her lips frothed with stats that I could barely hear, stats that meant nothing at all but SADNESS, though of course my head was nodding and—I discovered, hearing myself—I was making mm-hm sounds and even, on occasion, whenever the music of our exchange required it, saying the word "wow." I volleyed with her that way for an amount of time that felt significantly longer than any exchange in recent memory.

The clipboard that suddenly appeared in her hands was covered in stickers for her organization and cause. She was circling dollar amounts. I took it that these were my options.

When she stopped speaking her pen was resting on the smallest amount, the amount she said I could just give—as opposed to the higher amounts, which, if chosen, constituted an unqualified and fuller kind of giving. I then realized with not a little dread that she had mistook the sounds I had been making and the motion of my head as indicators of real interest, of sympathy or willingness, or—her eyes widening further—that I was a person on whom her words had had impact, a good person.

Now came the feeling that I had often felt before, one that I built my life, largely, to avoid—that I had committed myself falsely, that I had made promises I could not keep. It was a feeling, the fear of which had kept me from ever having once responded, either in the positive or negative, to a single e-vite. I did not know what I was going to do and liked very much to keep it that way.

How wretched and embarrassing it was for both of us that she had read me so closely and not taken heed of a person’s natural inclination to nod thoughtlessly to the tune of another’s speech. My head began to move the other way now, laterally, the side-to-side direction of no progress at all, a movement of the head that could have worked well in a modern art museum as a performance piece called Status Quo Keeping.

Still our faces were near touching—the distance at which people stand at the end of a date, when the walk home has come to its inevitable end. I told her this was not the way I wanted to do this, that it had no value, now, except as the submission of one person to the persuasiveness of another, that it could constitute nothing but my own weakness, that this wasn’t at all about children who are hungry—it was about her and I and the erasure of one another’s personal space. I told her that she was a woman and that I was a man. I suggested, unattractively, that these things were not coincidental but essential reasons for what was happening, for the closeness of her eyes to mine. Her pen waited there, still, on the brink, possibly, of her daily quota.

She said she was good at what she did and that because of this goodness she would try not to be offended by what I was suggesting and I had the feeling that this was something for which I was meant to be grateful. She said that she was an actress and that she could have done something more lucrative to support herself while pursuing her craft but this was what called out to her as needing more than anything else to be done.

I told her that if I gave her my credit card number—which I seemed already to be in the process of doing, my hand entering my pocket—it would not be for any child in any country anywhere, but for her. And if that was the case, I asked, did she still want it? Her eyes blinked. She stepped back.

After a moment, she said, well, I think you’ll be happy once you’ve done it, that you’ve made a difference.

I said, no, I won’t, I will feel like a person who has caved in to carefully applied pressure—that, in fact, by taking my money then, she was depriving me of the good feeling that might have come from going home and making an online donation on my own initiative. But then I realized she was busily copying my credit card number onto her form—not really listening anymore, just nodding.

A couple weeks later another young woman stops me—this one with beautiful tattooed trees climbing up her arm. I tell her that I have already been got and she says, “you’re awesome! High five!” Walking on toward the train, I do not feel awesome, but I do feel satisfied at having solved the problem of how to deal with these people: give them what they want. If you do, some kid somewhere might even get to eat, and a struggling actress too. I wonder how she’s doing.

Mac Barrett's fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in Salt Hill Review, Hanging Loose, The Brooklyn Rail, on Anderbo.com, Salon.com, and on the radio for WBAI. He works at CUNY TV as a producer of book-related programming.

Back in Manhattan my new workplace was called Solidaridad Humana—Human Solidarity. It was a giant shipwreck of a public school on Suffolk and Rivington Streets, long abandoned and vandalized before being commandeered by militants and mural painters with barely enough funds to clean the graffiti. The temperature inside was ridiculous even in March: we had no heat from oil. But there was plenty of heat from enthusiasm. The students were all recent arrivals from the Dominican Republic. Their population in New York was still small then, and they were breathtakingly ambitious. I had the vague sense they worked in shady places for illegal alien wages, and I knew they wanted clean labor in bright offices and big auto repair shops run by Americans. I knew because those were the jobs whose vocabulary I was supposed to teach them. And these were the words we used. We never talked about how they made a living in the meantime.

 I was young and cute with Jewish chick hippie body hair, and the female students kept saying, “Miss! You need to clean your eyebrows!” They didn’t mean it as an insult; the overarching vibe at Solidaridad Human was that everyone was beautiful—and since everyone was so hopped up on the place, that sentiment was heartfelt. The girls were curvy and had names like Leydy. The boys were polite and adorable. Even the old people were sexy, the men in their baggy tango suits on Fridays when we all stayed late and ate big squares of Dominican cornmeal pudding—majarete—and put salsa music on a boom box and danced; the matron-aged, worried women with makeup nonetheless, and heroically bared old cleavage.

 I ran a tight ship but a fun ship. “Teacher,” a student said once when I had them sing Joni Mitchell, “In this class it’s not just about how to work or how to buy a subway token. Teacher you love the English language!” Once during a punch-card lesson, I was thinking about last night with my boyfriend and the students saw my face and started laughing. Then Leydy announced she was marrying Joanny. Maritza started going with Rafy. It was hot in my class—there were even rumors that the hottest girl of all, a gloriously tall, rouged-cheek-boned 22 year old named Altagracia, was very ardent about Elvis and Emmanuel, and the class was so warm and mellow that the guys weren’t fighting over her but instead were sharing. A triangle? “Wow,” I thought, “The Lower East Side is burning!”

 One day in late March I got a new pedagogy idea. I would tape-record some stuff off WNYC, bring it into class, and play it—over and over and over if need be—so the repetition would drum my students with gradual and indelible comprehension.

 We started with the weather. “Blah blah blah blah blah rain blah blah,” I imagined them hearing at first, and I was right. “Rain teacher,” Elvis said. “I hear ‘rain.’

 “Good, class!” I chirped. “Let’s listen again.

 BlahblahblahtodayMarchtwenty-fifthblahblahrain.

“Today, March 25!"

"Good, class! Now let's rewind and replay."

 Blah rain blahblahrainyforty-oneblah blah.

 “Rain today windy forty-one degrees!”

 And so on, through about 14 repetitions, until they had the whole report burned in their brains, complete with grammar points like the future tense and even a few modals such as “should carry your umbrella.”

 “OK, great!” I chirped again. “Now let’s try something more interesting. The news!”

 Blahblahblahblahanniversaryblahblahblah.

 “An anniversary, teacher!”

 “Blahblahwomenblah….”

 “Women in factory, teacher!”

 Blah blah blah.

“Women in factory fell.”

 Blah blah. I was really into it, with my eyes scrunched up, feeling like such a good, innovative teacher. Then I looked. And listened. There was no more English and Altagracia was crying.

 “Ay dios mio todas murieron calcinadas?” she was saying, over and over in Spanish, just as I’d wanted everyone to do in their new language. “They all burned to death? They jumped? They burned! They jumped!”

 Everyone was weeping, and not just from sympathy, I suddenly realized. On the faces of the women I saw stark fear.

 “Teacher,” Altagracia said, and her tears rolled down. “We work in these places. We sew clothes. The doors are still locked! We ask for them to be unlocked and we’re refused!” She broke into sobs.

 Elvis and Emmanuel moved toward her. Till now, whatever they had done to her or with her had been out of class and merely rumored. Now, wanting to comfort her, they risked mutual exposure and their cool. They stared at each other. The class stared at them. Everything felt dampened as it never had before.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, feeling like a terrible teacher and desperately wanting to redeem myself. “Shall we talk about the danger and what to do about it?”

“There is nothing to do,” one of the older women said frostily in Spanish, as though I was a nice teacher but an idiot one. “Nothing except to improve ourselves. No more news tonight. Let’s do the lesson about data-entry words.”

I felt terrible for the duration of the class, and terrible when I walked in next day. The students, though, seemed fine. Leydy and Joanny were planning their wedding, mostly in Spanish but a little in English, too. Maritza was making eyes at Rafy. Altagracia, as usual, was holding court with her flushed cheekbones and smoldering rumors.

Debbie Nathan lives in Upper Manhattan. Her book, Sybil Exposed, about the making of the 1970s bestseller Sybil, is due out in October from Free Press.
 

The Roots drummer Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson cuts through the crowd, trailing a small posse of +1s and scampering paparazzo with their flashing bulbs, and somebody carrying a walkie-talkie whispers, “I think there are models here,” to another carrying the same. Then, the music cuts out at the DJ platform––which is next to the open-bar and above the hopscotch and four-square grids––and the Hollywood humanitarian hyphenate Rosie Perez mounts the stage.

She wears a pair of wide-legged black trousers, a slim-fitting white blouse and teeters on high, leather pumps. Her skin is bright and whiskey-colored, and the expression Rosie broadcasts to the crowd posturing before her belies a concomitant reticence and rehearsedness.

“There are people out there who actually believe that the education system in America is working,” she begins. “But I ask, for whom?”

Rosie is a co-founder of the Urban Arts Partnership, a New York based initiative working to close the intellectual, social and artistic achievement gaps of underserved public school students through arts-integrated education programs. She is here to celebrate the opening of RE:FORM SCHOOL, the weekend-long pop-up contemporary art gallery-come-education reform festival––proceeds payable to the UAP––taking place at 233 Mott Street, in what was, until shuttering at the end of the ’09/’10 school year, New York City’s oldest operating parochial day-school.

Huddled figures loom from the propped-open windows that face the yard, their backlit silhouettes still and silent, pausing to hear Rosie deliver her rhetoric: “There is a disgusting and shameful prejudice, here in America, that if you are born into poverty, you must be stupid, you must have a lower capacity to learn,” she says. “I was one of those kids that they discounted. Just because I was poor and I was on welfare, no one took the time to realize that I was extremely intelligent––thank you very much.”

Rosie says this with a precocious sass in her punchy Latin accent; it’s meant to offer a bit of comic relief, but the crowd hesitates out of a practiced “post-racial” politesse.

“And what changed my mind––because I was a pissed-off young person––was that, one day, there was a special trip to see a performance of The Wiz. And when I saw this young, black girl up there, singing ‘When I think of home, I think of a place / Where there’s love overflowing’; me, the tough kid; me, the kid that used to beat up little boys––who was really, inside, a nerd, a smart nerd, who just wanted people to like me––cried like a bitch. Like a bitch.”

The crowd perks up to the profanity, taking this as its queue to cut loose a little. Of course, anyone with a pulse would see the irony here: Rosie, at her most sentimental, wasn’t looking for a laugh.

“Seeing art, live, up there, on the stage, changed me as a person. That’s why I’m part of Urban Arts Partnership. There’s a new way to teach kids, and the arts is a big part of that. I hope that tonight you reach into your hearts, but more important, I hope that you reach into your pockets and buy some of the art that’s here. Because every drop in the bucket counts, because someone’s drop in the bucket changed me for the better. Thank you.”

Beside me, a slim young man in a well-tailored pantsuit says to a leggy blonde fingering her iPhone, “So, I guess there’s art inside?” They share a mutual shrug.

* * *

The school’s interior, once populated by the bags and books and buoyancy of the student-body whose thinning number necessitated its closing, has metamorphosed into a three-story, goodwill gallery displaying work from over 150 of the country’s more prominent––publicity hungry?––contemporary artists.

The men and women milling about the halls and classrooms are a very different breed from those outside, who are mainly interested in playing catch-up and parsing party turnout. These are the collectors and gallerists and, conceivably, some are the artists.

In a cramped, coat closet-sized ex-classroom, a small audience has gathered to watch a somber man with chin-length hair play improvised cello suites––the pitch and tone of which send droplets of water leaping into the air from the two, shallow, rectangular troughs positioned on either side of the behemoth instrument. This is one of several “pieces” contributed by Michael Murphy, an artist and teacher based in Milledgeville, GA, who flew in a group of his students to help set up his super-sized installation art. The cellist was sourced and hired via Craigslist, several days prior.

Murphy’s “USA Pencil Install” is a divisive three-dimensional info-graphic comprised entirely of #2 pencils––which are wood with a black-paint coating, and capped with eraser-heads of either neon pink, green, orange or yellow rubber––and negative space. Into the clean white plaster of a high-ceilinged wall, a dot-dash system of holes has been drilled to form an outline of the United States, with like holes plotted within every square inch of the interior surface area of the nation. The pattern in which the pencils have been plugged into these holes is such that each of the fifty states is identifiable by not only its designated neon hue, but also its percentile average of high school graduates.

Beside this America, a key––written in pencil and coded with eraser-cap clusters––elucidates the value represented by each of the four colors. For the states with the fewest issued diplomas––California, Florida, and Texas, among others––the holes are left empty, bald and gaping, within the neon-orange rubber outlines of their intranational borders.

Murphy’s art is technically precise and of exceptional design; but, being location-bound––or, in the case of the cellist, human––none of it is for sale. Art über alles.

Upstairs, in a long, window-lit room with a particleboard partition situated at its center to create an ad hoc perambulate path of floorspace, framed mix-media pieces occupy just about every spare scrap of blackboard and wall. (The art here in particular, and throughout the entirety of the campus in theory, takes its inspiration from the sanctioned themes of the event––namely, Knowledge, Community, Creativity & Inspiration, and Teachers Who Inspire.)

Two art-rich seeming men in sunglasses and suit-jackets glide over to a set of framed woodcuts by the artist Scott Albrecht. One piece displays the message DON’T GIVE UP in primary colors, the other reads EVERY DAY IS A NEW DAY. They are, for a brief moment, quiet and contemplative, then one man says to the other, “I like these,” and a volunteer swoops in to inform the man that “they are $300 a piece.” “I want ‘em,” he says. The woman asks which, and Mr. Impulsive says he’ll take the pair. Purple dots are then placed beside each; they have been sold in under four seconds.

* * *

More art sells––most, in fact. Or at least that which is mobile and amenable to transit. There is live music on the blacktop, and, to the displeasure of the many parched patrons, little booze left in the ice buckets. One woman, whose skirt skims her knickers, with a neckline south of her navel, expresses audible resentment when someone luckier than she plucks a solitary cup of cabernet from within the sea of drained bottles and dropped dollar-bills.

The temporary step-and-repeat––which has been erected in the concrete alleyway between the playground and the curb––is plugged by a swell of artist-parents with babies Bjorn-swaddled to their chests; their older children zip around the playground’s perimeter on collapsable steel scooters. The party is not yet over, but it might as well be, and these children seem an odd late-addition to the after-school affair.

Curbside, at the school’s Prince Street exit, a broken-down school-bus rests upon cinderblock supports where its wheels ought to be. Layers of aerosol paint have been spritzed on its cheddar-colored body, cartoonish clouds of magenta, grape, baby-blue and silver; and for each smashed-in window, there is an open socket and a web of tempered glass that sags like twinkling lace. Above the windshield and the rear exit, and along the length of each side of its middle, a supplemental ‘T’ has been tacked onto the chains of decal-lettering; the text reads PUBLIC SCHOOL BUST in a bold, black font.

A troupe of four girls in their mid-teens swirls from around the corner at Mott and heads up Prince, toward the bus. They are shrill and sing-songy, and it looks like they are dancing even though they are not. They pause at the bus, unsure of what is before them, then move in concentric circles around its wide berth. “Fifty-four percent of dropouts ages sixteen to twenty-four are jobless?” one reads aloud, disbelieving, from the decal beside the door. Then: “High school drop outs have a life expectancy 9.2 years shorter than high school graduates?” She and her friends agree that it’s Gotta be a joke and Nuh-uh, not for real. And just as quick as they’d come, the girls again bob down the street, away from St. Patrick’s, cheeks fat from laughter, divorced from the four near-empty backpacks that flap and kick at their shoulders.

Molly Oswaks is a freelance writer and editor living in Manhattan's West Village. This is her first story to appear on the site.

A 1950’s Sunset Appetizer Book inspired the retro nibbles, including deviled eggs arranged on Tupperware’s Eggs-ceptional Server Set which, incidentally, fits into the Round Cake Taker, for easier transport, and also inverts to make a cake stand. There were classic pigs in a blanket, as well as ham and cream cheese cubes, chosen for Sunset’s pithy description: “These delectable appetizers have gay colors and the stripes of a peppermint stick.” Chicken salad, among other time-tested goodies, was served on white bread rounds cut from an old-fashioned biscuit cutter and placed on Tupperware’s spring colored containers, based on a 1950’s photo of an appetizer spread.

Gone was the angst of Tupperware parties past, the pressure I remember my own mother feeling, the result, most likely, of the conventional Greenwich housewife protocol that if you attended a Tupperware party, you were expected to return the favor and host one. (You can now buy Tupperware online and in malls).

With a nod to this kind of obsessive 1950’s entertaining, an oversized movie screen bore the silent projection of Rock Hudson and Doris Day’s Pillow Talk. That and the musical compilation, Martini Madness, provided the final touches of archness that kept the party attendees from taking the proceedings—or themselves—too seriously. The point of this Tupperware party was simple fun: see friends, eat, drink, maybe go home with a container or two. “Everyone’s thinking about the war,” said Young, appropriately clad in a red wool dress straight out of I Love Lucy (though she prefers to think of it as her Roman Holiday dress, a la Audrey Hepburn). “With all our friends attending peace marches, it seemed important to bring everyone together. To have a break,” she said. “The thought of doing a European-inspired dinner,” she added (the parties in her book all took place in Europe), “seemed completely ridiculous. Tupperware sort of follows my book into America after the war.”

Indeed Tupperware’s connection to World War II extends beyond mere timing. Earl Tupper, a freelance inventor, worked for Dupont in the1940’s, using polyetheline plastic to make gas masks and windshields for B52 bombers. In 1947, looking for domestic uses for this plastic, Tupper designed a line of high-end dinner plates, hoping they would find their way into the dining rooms of 5th Avenue.

When this venture lagged, Tupper turned his attentions further inward, that is, toward refrigerators and cupboards. Sales were modest until Tupper’s discovery of Brownie Wise, a divorcée from Detroit, who was, apparently, buying Tupperware by the hamperful. According to Young, “Tupper called Wise up. He was like, ‘Wow, how are you selling so much?’ only to realize Brownie was inviting women over to her house and giving them demonstrations, the better to sell his products. Door to door sales had been a big source of employment since the Depression,” Young continued. “This type of sale—probably why your mom felt so much pressure—was more community-based, involving people you would normally interact with socially.” In 1956, because of their balance of Bauhaus ideals of form and function on a Post-war industrial scale, Tupperware was accepted into the Museum of Modern Art’s design collection, thanks to design curator Arthur Drexler.

No Tupperware party would be complete without a demonstration, of course, so as the cocktail banter began to dwindle, our evening’s representative, Nellie O’Brien, formerly a TV anchor for local stations in New York and Connecticut, took her place at the head of the Tupperware display. Wearing what looked like a white lab coat, the perky blonde confessed with a sigh, “I was organizationally challenged.” Now a self-proclaimed “organizational expert,” O’Brien’s tone was part ironic, part Born-Again preacher. “Let’s face it,” she continued, “bugs love the glue that holds bags and boxes together.” Against a chorus of groans, O’Brien recounted her personal discovery of Tupperware’s moisture-free containers, Modular Mates, one fateful night at a friend’s party. After Tupperizing her cupboards, she moved on to a more formidable concern: her refrigerator. “My freezer used to be a frozen tundra,” she admitted, wide-eyed. “It was full of UFO’s—unidentified frozen objects. There were chicken breasts frozen to the walls.” Her refrigerator was no better. “My broccoli,” she said, disgustedly. “Ugh! What nobody knows, what I didn’t know, is that food breathes at different rates.” Pausing a moment, for the weight of this to sink in, she held up a FridgeSmart container and added: “Now my broccoli stays fresh and green and crisp for five weeks.”

After a series of hoots and applause, and the demonstration of an ice cube melting with great speed in a Tupperware Ice Cream Scoop, the rapt audience reverted to Jello shots. O’Brien graciously took her cue. “If you have any further questions,” she shouted over the mounting din, “feel free to ask me. But not until I’ve had my vodka and tonic.”

Someone turned up the music. People rushed to the demonstration area for order forms and catalogues. A tall, handsome man clutching a Tupperware spatula, let out a groan. “Everyone must hold a spatula before they go,” he insisted. Across the room, a goateed man in black leather spoke excitedly into his cell phone. “Honey, have you ever heard of Tupperware?”

Most of these students had come during the summer from Tehran. They weren’t like American Jews, whose last names reveal ethnicity and whose first names conceal it in a few generations. The Iranian Jews’ family names were pure Persian, marks of millennia in that country — twisting with phonetics as sinuous as the names in the news: Khomeni, Bazarghan. The cheater’s last name started with L and sounded something like the English word “ululation,” but with many more syllables. It was gorgeous and it was a problem. In other countries, my students told me, the Jews try to be citizens of their adopted nations, but their oppressors say, “First you are Jewish.” Here, we try to be Jews. And the INS says, “First you are Iranians.”

L. said his last name meant “from a beautiful garden,” and I suspected he was trying to charm me into grading his test. He laughed while translating the name, mocking my ignorance of its meaning and the meaning of his cheating.

He also mocked the Lubavitchers of Williamsburg, who sponsored the Iranian students’ immigration, crewcutted the young men and enrolled them in yeshivas. By autumn some were trying to weasel out of the deal and had struck a compromise with their sponsors by enrolling in City Colleges. They came wearing yarmulkes in hair too short to anchor them, and bobby pins kept splattering on my classroom floor.

As fall passed their hair grew back and the skullcaps disappeared. In September they’d said they wore them because here they could be Jews without fear of Muslim repression. Now L. told me he’d gotten his own apartment; now he didn’t have to wear the kepah to please the crazy Hassids. He sneered at their funny dress — as he sneered at the cancer of the Shah and at Princess Farah, grown ugly in exile; at the Ayatollah Khomeni, whom he called “Imam” while rotating an index finger near his temple. The Lubavitchers were the real problem, though, because some yeshivas wouldn’t send academic records to the City Colleges, and many Iranian Jews were studying without student visas.

It was hard to know much more about L. In my beginners class, we were still using flashcards with words like “snow,” “wife” and “true.”

“Mr. L.,” I said as he grinned at me and the empty classroom. “If you cheat you’ll never learn English. No, I cannot grade your exam.”

“Alright. We speak of test later,” he wheedled. “But please, where is this store?” He held a battered Diario-La Prensa, covered with heel marks and subway floor dirt. He pointed to an ad in which he had circled in red ink a product called the Clairol TenderTweez, wholesale to the public $10.97, with plug, plastic chassis and two shiny prongs. It looked compact and fastidious, like an instrument of torture from the SAVAK.

“I like to buy this electric tool for my sister in Iran. Where I can go to get it?” he said. “She has many hairs on face, legs. This will take away forever.”

“Well Mr L., you’re right. It is electric. But it doesn’t remove hair forever.”

“Not forever? No, it must. It’s expensive American. Forever.”

“No really. It’s not.”

“I don’t believe. I want to send this to Iran,” he said, his eyes shining. “Here. Here is picture of my sister.”

He showed me a passport photo. The girl’s brows, lashes and hairline, like her brother’s, were so dark as to appear burned into her face. There was a suggestion of moustache. It had clearly been tweezed, and her features were chalked over with cheap pancake makeup that suggested her hidden hairiness all the more. I envisioned that feminine hirsuteness said to please the men of Italy and rumored to drive eccentrics of other cultures wild with yearning. To look at this Oriental Jewess, her face plucked of all spontaneity, was to recall the ironic kindness of the veil.

L. pointed to the Diario-La Prensa ad. Quita los pelos sin dolor, it says. “What it’s mean, sin dolor?”

“Without pain,” I answered.

“Dolor, it means pain?” He started to write the word in his notebook.

“No, no, don’t put it on your vocabulary list! It’s Spanish.”

“Spanish! Ah, I was worried. I didn’t understand any words in this paper. Except Nueva York.” He sighed with relief as I checked his other notes.

“Put an E at the end of tweez,” I told him.

“E? Why? Ah, I understand. Tweez, that’s Spanish.”

“Mr. L.,” I insisted. “Isn’t it natural for women to have hair? On their legs? Even a little on their faces? Anyway, isn’t it a lot of trouble to try to send a TenderTweez to Iran right now? Especially when you’ve got more important things to worry about?”

He suddenly glared and fumed, realizing how things were with me.

“More natural, yes. But without hair, more beautiful. With hair, ugly! Natural? Hah! I am not Ayatollah! I am not Imam! Natural? The veil, never! We are here, we Jews, in Nueva York, not to be crazy. Not to be maniacs! And now, teacher,” he hissed with smoldering eyes. “And now you will grade my test.”

I looked at the time, 11:15 a.m., and decided that rather than stay home and suffer through the rally noise I may as well walk over and take a look. I called up a friend who I knew was going to participate, and made an appointment to meet at noon on the corner of 2nd Avenue and 51st Street. I stood on the corner waiting, and while my toes went numb and the skin on the back of my hands became red, I read the signs floating past me as rallyers marched uptown, toward the epicenter: “Drop Bush Not Bombs,” “No War For Oil,” “El Mundo dice No a la Guerra!,” “UN phone #s – 1800-defunct,” “Food Not War,” “Women For Afghan Women.”

Here is where I became a little confused. I expected a lot of peace signage, and here I was reading about all these different plights. Fair enough, let’s help Afghan women, but wasn’t this march about not sending American troops into Iraq? I became even more confused when I saw a group of African-Americans waving “Stop War and Racism” posters with pictures of black people, and pro-Palestinians with “Israeli terrorists out of Palestine” signs. There sure were a lot of agendas this morning.

My friend called and said she was blocked in a throng of people up on 3rd Avenue and 53rd Street. As I impatiently made my way among the snail-paced demonstrators, I picked up the strident cry of a woman behind me: ” Buy your official rally buttons for $2, buy them right here.” In Italy, where I am from, she would have made the fish vendors in the market envious.

I got up to 53rd but the police had blocked off access to 3rd Avenue. A policeman came up to me and a couple of other women and patiently explained that we couldn’t stand there. We needed to go down through the subway passage and come out on the other side. When I emerged onto 3rd Avenue, I was unprepared for the quantity of bodies. I decided to stay in the relative haven of the subway entrance, leaning against the rail at the end of the escalator.

Very different groups of people passed by: young white girls with carefully arranged dreadlocks stuffed under knit caps, bemused white-haired men in raincoats with the morning newspaper tucked under their armpits, clusters of closely cropped gray-haired women with whiskers on their chins and teenage sons trailing behind them asking questions, young bohemian-chic parents with babies on their shoulders, two boys with Mohawk hairdos (a pink one and a yellow one) and plaid pants (punk chic). A young chubby man, probably in his late twenties, jumped up on the back of a parked police car and tried to incite a round of “woohoos,” which unfortunately was echoed by only one friend. Better luck for the boys chanting “one, two, three, four, we don’t want your bloody war.” It did rhyme after all, and had a pleasant cadence. Another chant that I didn’t understand, however, was “free 53rd, free 53rd,” though I suppose that demanding access to that particular street would in some way demonstrate how strong and successful the will of the people could be when they got together.

I also saw a lot of anti-Bush signs, twice as many as those calling for peace. A black girl carried a “Bush is a Terrorist” sign, and a white boy had a picture of the President’s face within a star with the word “cowboy” printed below. Yes, President Bush, these people do not like you. There were effigies of you and of your advisors, and I must commend their designers, since they were rather better made than the ones we see on television floating on the streets of Iraq.

It was all very entertaining and I clearly was not the only one who thought so. A couple on a stroll munched M&Ms as they watched. A group of teenagers alighted from the subway escalator, took in the scene and one finally said “Yeah, this is where the party starts,” as he turned on his boom box. Other kids were more serious as they purposefully made their way through the crowds with furrowed brows and worried expressions. They were on cell-phones, intent on finding their friends.

The march was so orderly that the large number of police officers seemed unnecessary, though the police did cut a nice picture – particularly the infantry division on their gorgeous steeds. In my opinion, however, they were outshone by the beautiful, tall Latin-American girl, dressed in tight orange jeans and a little black sweater, being led away with her hands held back by plastic handcuffs. A sexy mixture of bondage and righteousness.

I headed home after two hours, thoroughly frozen and bored. On my way back I observed street vendors and a few Rastafarian guys selling blue T-shirts, posters and scarves with the 2003 Peace Rally date on it. This post-concert-type paraphernalia was somehow fitting.

“It’s a coil and it rests against the outside of your nostril,” he said, making a swirling motion with his finger.

I chose the smallest silver stud, trying not to think of nostril scars or how loud my parents would scream when I told them I’d punctured my face instead of getting married.

See, in my family, 28 is an age for engagement rings, not nose jewelry. My 25-year-old sister was contemplating marriage with her Italian pro basketball-player boyfriend; holidays with my Irish Catholic cousins were beginning to resemble a large-scale cloning experiment. My unmarried status cast me in the role of misfit, black sheep, Leather Tuscadero. I liked it.

Something was missing, though. Despite my badass standing, with my Marcia Brady hair and Gap clothes I looked like I was playing the part of Nice Girl With No Prospects For Marriage. I might have been the Leather Tuscadero of my extended suburban Boston family, but I was the Shirley Feeney of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Too conservative to dye my hair blue, too thrifty to buy a black leather wardrobe, I decided a nose stud was the perfect way to express my spit-in-the-face-of-tradition image while leaving my options open.

Bingo took me into a back room, which resembled a dentist’s office. “Blow for good luck,” he said, handing me a tissue. I closed my eyes as he twisted, pulled, and stretched my left nostril. It might have hurt, but I was so busy cursing myself for not checking for stray boogers I didn’t notice. I even forgot about Mom and Dad.

When I opened my eyes I spied a thick needle extending several inches from my left nostril. I closed them again. After Bingo finished, I looked in the mirror. The stud might as well have been the size of a golf ball. I imagined my dad taking his 8-iron and teeing me straight back to Nice Girl With No Prospects For Marriage.

“You’re sure this is the one I picked out?” I asked Bingo. He nodded.

Feeling kind of sick, I walked out onto St. Marks Place, my nose red and tingling. In the face of a Pakistani earring vendor I saw the sadness of my mother, heartbroken because a nose stud, no matter how discreet, is not going to attract a country club guy with a beach house in Nantucket and a degree from Holy Cross.

In fact, it was a week before Mother’s Day, and I was going home. I figured I had seven days to live. Maybe calling in an advance warning would buy me some time.

“Uh, Mom, just so you know?” I said. “I pierced my nose.”

I closed my eyes and waited.

“Oh Cara,” she said. “Ohhh, Cara. What, do you need attention or something? You have such a pretty face.”

“You’ll hardly notice it, I swear.” I could feel my inner Harley driver cowering in the corner.

“Is it because you didn’t go through a rebellious stage in high school? Are you into drugs or something?” she said. “Oh, and I just saw a Dateline expose on hepatitis. Who’s going to take care of you when you get hepatitis?”

Who would take care of me if I got hepatitis? Bingo? I imagined myself sick and going it alone, my body riddled with piercings to distract from the pain of my terrible illness.

That Friday night, Mom and Dad picked me up at the bus stop. Evidently, their plan was to ignore the piercing.

That lasted about 15 minutes. On the way home, we stopped for groceries. A chubby man in Bermuda shorts and a polo shirt passed us in the potato chip aisle. “See?” Dad said. “He did a double-take when he saw your nose.”

I wasn’t convinced the man even looked in my direction, but I began to feel paranoid. What was I thinking, piercing my face like some bohemian? I mean, where I was born, “body art” meant wearing pants with lobsters. “It’s the size of a pinhead. You can’t see it from five feet away,” I reminded myself. All the same, the nose stud re-grew to the size of a golf ball.

To celebrate Mother’s Day, Mom and I went to the mall for manicures. I almost never pay to have my nails done, but when I do I like to choose an unusual color. To my surprise, Mom liked the idea, too. She chose a dark blue-gray and I got a sparkly orange that turned fluorescent with heat. As we sat at our nail-drying stations I saw her admiring her fingers, proud to have chosen something “a little different.” They looked “a little scary,” actually, but I kept that to myself.

When Mom and I got home, Dad was on the couch watching golf on TV. “Do you like our nails?” Mom asked as we fluttered our fingers before him.

Dad looked at Mom’s nails for a second, then turned back to the TV. “I’m surprised you didn’t pierce your nose, too,” he said. Mom rolled her eyes and smiled.

And that was the last time my parents mentioned my pierced nose. Not long after, I took the stud out and threw it away. It lost its appeal after I inducted Mom into the Hall of Badassdom. But lately I’ve been wondering: what would Dad think of a “Daddy’s Little Girl” tattoo?