WILL SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME WHEN THE CELEBRATION BEGINS?
Once again, on October 23, there was a story in the New York Times (“A Diverse City? In Some Ways, Anything But”) pointing out with shock and dismay that our fair city is not as diverse as many would like to think. In fact, says the article’s author, Ginia Bellafante, in her “Big City” column, the city ranks third in a recent study among the nation’s most segregated, behind only Detroit and Milwaukee. The last time I looked, New York’s public schools actually topped the hit parade for segregation in education.
So OK, clearly Integration (with a capital “I”) didn’t quite work out as planned, neither here nor in most other American cities. Lord knows some people tried, and some – God bless them – are still trying; but for the most part, integration in both word and deed has disappeared from our collective memory, as if it never happened at all. A quick look around, or just a check at recent Supreme Court decisions, and you’ll wonder if it wasn’t all just a bad dream.
Somewhere along the way, though, Diversity (with a capital “D”) was born, and for those who are loathe to be called racist, or anti-this or anti-that, what a wondrous thing it is! Like a fine soloist, diversity can sound good without any back-up – something to mention in a brochure, list as an HR action point, or even to boast about sweetly as in, “We live in a wonderfully diverse community.” Sure, skin color usually springs to mind whenever the term comes up, but the fact of the matter is that diversity is wide open to personal and highly creative interpretation.
To define diversity, dictionaries tend to use the word variety, as in “the spice of life,” which is appropriate, given that how diversity is viewed or promoted is really more a function of how much spice a particular group is willing to take. A similar notion can be applied to the ever-popular “Celebrate Diversity”: How big a party do you want to throw? Apart from the inclusion of more ethnic and religious holidays on calendars, the appointment of people of color as corporate diversity go-to guys and gals, tedious training videos and a few pot-luck dinners, I can’t say that there’s been much sizzle to the celebration.
I thought I’d do an online search to explore the evolution of diversity as social imperative and when exactly the marriage occurred between it and the word “celebrate.” Google presented me with a rather lengthy and broad list of possibilities: many were educational in nature, and others provided multicultural support and goods; but then there were also mocking websites brought to us by various white supremacist groups, and surprisingly – well, I suppose for some diversity in itself can be a celebration of sorts – a substantial amount of pornography.
For me, however, the most intriguing hit was the one that then came up in second place after icelebratediversity.com. It offered a t-shirt, available in a choice of three lovely colors, with “Celebrate Diversity” printed across the front all right, below remarkably realistic pictures of 18 different types of guns. Only $19.99!
Now, never in my wildest dreams could I see New York City as being a big market for this particular fashion statement, but somebody is buying them; and between that and the White Power websites, I’m just not feeling the love
“Oh, but we’re so lucky to be living in New York, the most diverse place in the world,” a fellow mom enthused when I told her that I was writing about diversity issues in independent schools like the one attended by both of our daughters. Indeed, many believe that by living north of the Mason-Dixon line they are somehow immune to or absolved of bigotry, and that because of circumstances that make New York City unique in regularly throwing people of all types and backgrounds together on busy Midtown sidewalks, crowded public transportation, and high-rise elevators, they are themselves celebrating diversity every single day. Provided everyone stays in their place, of course: It’s all well and fine to talk baseball with the Dominican doormen, share a few laughs with the West Indian or Filipina women who take care of the kids, and be utterly dependent on that lovely brown-skinned secretary with the Spanish accent, but God forbid that someone who looks like them should ever be a colleague, friend, or guest in their home. Far too many adults have grown up with the idea that it isn’t or couldn’t be done. “After all,” I’ve heard people say, “What on earth would we have to talk about?”
I’ll be the first person to tell you that I enjoy a good party,
whether it’s a few friends around a dinner table or a blow-out
dance-a-thon. And while food, music, drinks and even decorations are
important, I think it’s the people that really make the party. If they
all look the same, it can be pretty boring. If they all live in the same
neighborhood and are involved in the same activities, professional or
otherwise, after a while, you just run out of things to say. To have a
really good celebration, I’d say it’s all in the guest list and who is doing
the inviting.
A lot of us are still waiting for the fun to begin.
OF TIME, PLACE AND "THE HELP"
I enjoyed the book for a couple of reasons: First of all, it made fun of the Junior League, to which I have devoted a great many volunteer hours and nearly half my life, but still appreciate its very special culture, north or south, east or west. You have to have a sense of humor to make it as long as I have.
Secondly, I’m a sucker for a story about seemingly unlikely friendships and people who have the courage to form them. Remember that show, “I’ll Fly Away?” I cried at every episode.
But here’s the thing about The Help: Place the story in the south of the early 1960s and everyone thinks that racial segregation and discrimination happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. “Phew, glad we’re done with that” or “Thank goodness I didn’t live in the south back then.” It might as well have taken place in outer space.
Cut to New York’s Upper East Side in 2005, just steps from Park Avenue and, quite coincidentally, at the headquarters of the Junior League. There’s a party going on: Someone’s turning eight. Upon arriving to fetch her own son, my friend was surprised to find women – all babysitters of varying ethnic backgrounds – gathered together in a separate room, on a different floor from the festivities. Before heading upstairs, she stopped to greet those whom she knew, and had to ask why they were not with their various charges. She learned that the mother had requested that all of the babysitters wait in this holding room until the party was over. Puzzled, my friend went on to the room where the children were gleefully partying and asked the birthday boy’s mom what the deal was with the nannies being excluded. The mother scoffed, “Well, you don’t want the help to be where you socialize, do you?”
There it is: “The Help.” In New York City, 2005, and I’m pretty sure that’s no isolated incident. Go back a bit and read my earlier entries on the Nanny Syndrome and invisibility. That’s just a tip of the proverbial iceberg.
No, we are not done with that. Women of color still make up the majority of the domestic workforce throughout the country. They’re expected to. I could be wrong, but their relationships with their employers don’t seem terribly different from those between the maids and the Junior League gals in “The Help.” Look around: You’ll see what I’m talking about. For example, practically every recommendation, or request for a recommendation, that I’ve seen for a babysitter or cleaning lady carries the word honest. Seriously, would you suggest someone who wasn’t?
Seven years ago, I shared and elevator to my apartment with an older woman, who turned out was visiting my neighbor in a very swank, minimal minority building. We chatted about the weather on the way up, but when we parted company on my floor, she said, “Oh, you work for the woman next door?” “No,” I told her, “I am the woman next door.”
The official slogan for “The Help” is “Change begins with a whisper.” Clearly, we haven’t been whispering enough. There’s still time, though.
A Hoody P.S.
I saw my first white guy with sagging pants the other day. A tall skinny dude with a lot of hair and a beret on top. I suppose he thought that letting us see his bright red boxers made him look like some kind of hipster; but really, the only thing he looked was ridiculous.
In a roundabout way, though, that comical sight made me think of white guys and hoodies and a story that a friend once told me that really brings home the point I make about jumping to conclusions.
My friend’s niece was in town for a few days. Recently engaged, she dutifully called her aunt, saying that she wanted to come by and introduce her fiancé. The aunt – my friend, who is Jewish – invited the newly betrothed couple for Saturday brunch where she laid out what was surely a sumptuous array of bagels, lox, various toppings, fruit, coffee and tea. In walked the fiancé, wearing…you guessed it…a hoody. During the afternoon, he said little, ate only an orange, and never, ever took off his hood. My friend and her husband were perplexed and deeply concerned: The niece was so vivacious and smart, what was she doing with this “sullen,” “rude” and surely not too bright man?
The answer came the following day, when the niece called to thank her hosts for a lovely afternoon. When my friend commented that the fiancé didn’t seem to have eaten anything, the niece explained that he was Orthodox and kept kosher. The only thing he could eat was the orange. In fact, she went on, finding himself without anything to cover his head – we’re still not sure how that happened – he felt it was necessary to keep his hood on the entire afternoon. As for his lack of conversation, well, turns out he’s just plain shy. Giant sigh of relief!
If my friends could be so wrong about this guy, imagine what people are thinking when the face peeping out through the hood is one of a million shades of brown. Hey, I know it’s getting chilly out there, but if you don’t want to be taken for a criminal, how about wearing a nice knit cap? And for heaven’s sake, unless you're an Orthodox Jew, take whatever is on your head off when you’re inside!
FASHION STATEMENTS
Ah, it’s that time again. The leaves change, the days grow shorter, there’s a chill in the air, and all across America, up go the hoods. That’s not to say that there weren’t more than a handful of die-hards out there during the summer, but for the most part, from, say, mid-May until mid-October, we have only had to endure the assault of falling-down britches from our young men of color. Delightful.
So it’s time for me to divulge a couple of my own prejudices: Hoodies and baggy pants make me crazy. Here’s the way I look at it: If you dress like a hoodlum, people are going to think you are one. I understand that that’s precisely the point, but I fail to see the glory in appearing to be fresh out of prison.
During the summer, in 90 degrees and humidity to match, all over Harlem young black men were wearing black sweatshirts with the hoods pulled up over baseball caps. In the words of Cole Porter, “It’s too darn hot” for that nonsense. Back in February, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, lamenting the extraordinary amount of times that police stop African-American young men, pointed out that the officers often cite the kids' attire as being "inappropriate for the weather conditions." Now that temperatures are cooling down, sweatshirts themselves are not so inappropriate, but does the hood have to be up even on sunny days?
Hey, I get all the stuff about civil liberties, and absolutely, the police stop too many young men of color for no reason other than the color of their skin, but seriously, how can they tell the baddies from the goodies if they’re all wearing hoodies? (Made that one up myself.)
A few months ago, the police stopped by our place to ask if we could look at the recordings from the security cameras to see if they had captured anything having to do with a rare mugging on our block. Going back to the date and window of time that they gave me, I watched as group after group of hooded young men walked past. Any of them could have snatched that poor lady’s purse, I thought, but wait, there’s a bunch of them running! My guess is it was them, but who knows? They had hoods on.
Moving on to baggy pants, I’m truly offended by the rampant display of men’s underwear, and for the life of me, can’t understand why more people, especially the women who love them, aren’t. I don’t want to see anyone’s undergarments – not when I’m walking down the street, not on the bus, and definitely not while I’m eating. And don’t those boys look pathetic trying to walk and not have their pants fall down around their ankles? It would be comical, if it weren’t so sad. In a number of locales, politicians and city officials have launched “Bag the Sag” campaigns. Good luck with that! What will it really take to get young men to pull up their pants?
They say that fashion trends are cyclical. Since my daughter was born, I’ve been praying for the return of the preppy look of my youth. Now that she’s almost a teenager, though, time is running out. And then will surely begin a new chapter in diversity parenting. Stay tuned.
MORE ON IDENTITIES
I just finished sobbing my way through the ending of Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese’s excellent – albeit a little heavy on the surgical details – novel about conjoined twins who were separated at birth, grew up in the compound of an Addis Ababa hospital, and eventually became physicians themselves. After fleeing Ethiopia in the wake of the coup that overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie, one of the brothers, Marion,lands in the Bronx, interning at a small, struggling hospital that appears to be populated only by countryless souls like himself, both staff and patients.
In a book full of wonderful observations about human nature,I found a particularly relevant AHA! moment that illuminated something that I have been trying to figure out for a long time: Why some people can tell every blond child in the room apart, but can’t seem to remember the name of the one black, Hispanic or Asian child among them.
So here’s what happens in the story: Marion, who is half Indian and half British, is in the operating room assisting one of his Indian colleagues, Deepak. A white doctor, in the Bronx to collect transplantable organs for his fancy Boston hospital, happens to enter, observes their work, and after asking the colleague’s name and several questions about the procedure, compliments him on his technique then leaves for his helicopter.
We worked in silence. At last, Deepak said, “He heard my name just once…and he was able to repeat it . . . In all my years here, no one’s been able to remember my name when I’m introduced. No one has bothered. They usually see us as types, not as individuals.”
Deepak summed it all up right there, in these four,profoundly moving sentences: the experience, the frustration, a clear explanation, and the joyous dignity of recognition.
From parents of color, I have heard many stories of failure to remember their names and those of their children, no matter how many times they’ve been introduced, an inability to recognize them outside of the context of school, an unwillingness to even try to pronounce correctly names not commonly found in the US, and a difficulty in matching children to parents. Similar tales come out of the workplace. Several have said to me, “We’re just not important to them.” Others see it as an effort to denigrate – note the etymology here – sort of like the use of “Boy” in times gone by that, well, it seems are not so gone after all.
The part about seeing people of color as types, rather than as individuals really hit home with me. I thought of the time when my daughter was in preschool. There were 13 in the afternoon program with her, two of them girls with brown skin and not much else on the lookalikescale. Almost three months into the school year, a mother, who I saw every day at drop-off and pick-up, came tome to offer some niceties about who she believed to be my daughter while using the other girl’s name. When I pointed out that she was probably referring to another child, she appeared completely dumbfounded and confused. She was certain that she had the name right. I had to break the news to her that there were in fact two brown-skinned girls in the class, and with them, lo-and-behold, two sets of brown-skinned parents. In three months, she had never noticed.
Surely, as we get older, it’s natural to forget names every once in a while, and to some extent, I think we are all guilty of looking at certain people – immigrants, people of color, whatever – as types. But that doesn’t make it OK. I know I’m straying into heavy moral and theological territory when I talk about recognizing the dignity of the individual, but hey, it’s a really good conceptand one that we as parents would do well to teach to our children, especially through our own actions.
Just last week, a mother at my daughter’s present school asked me how she was enjoying Upper School. I told her that mine was actually in fourth grade now. Oh dear, there was that same bewildered look that that preschool mom wore six years ago. Yes, she had me confused with someone else, and my daughter with another child, although I’m not sure whom; forget that neither the girls nor the mothers looked anything alike. In an effort to be fair, I guess I should give the woman credit for trying. Clearly, though, we can all stand to bother a heck of a lot more.
MISTAKEN IDENTITIES
Now granted, I was wearing a skirt from Talbots, my daughter’s age falls midway between Sasha’s and Malia’s, and our dog is very cute, but other than that and our brown skin, we look nothing like the First Lady and her daughters.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m flattered by the comparison. However, I continue to be baffled by this strange compulsion, this burning desire to classify African-Americans floating solo amongst the majority – and I do believe this condition is exclusive to black people – as famous, meaning athletes, entertainers, and I guess now the President and his family.
Living in Switzerland in the mid-1980’s, a place certainly better known for its xenophobia rather than its diversity, I often heard people whispering to each other that I was the singer Sade. I met a woman the other night, who looked nothing like me, but had had similar experiences in Boston. My guess is there were a lot of us. Hmmm...let’s see…creamy coffee skin, hair pulled back, sunglasses…yes, of course, it must be Sade! Does this even make sense?
When I tell people that I work in television, they ask what shows they may have seen me in. No – guess what! – I’m an executive, and as far as I know, no actress will ever hesitate to identify her calling up front.
If I’m specific and say I work in sports, more often than not someone will say, “You must have been quite an athlete yourself!” No, actually, I am the most uncoordinated woman I’ve ever met. “Oh come on,” they’ll tell me, “that’s not possible.” OK fine. Does it count that I spent an evening signing autographs in a Seoul nightclub during the 1988 Olympics? The Koreans insisted that I was Florence Griffith-Joyner, may she rest in peace. All they had to do was look at the fingers holding the pen to know that I was an imposter. Ah, but I didn’t have the heart to let them down.
One of my favorite stories comes from a friend who had been amazed at the friendliness of the neighbors and staff in the ritzy Upper East Side apartment building that she and her husband, both highly successful corporate types, had just moved into with their children. After a few weeks of big smiles and cheerful hellos, a grinning doorman blurted out, “We are all so excited to have a player from the New York Knicks living here!” They’re still trying to figure out which one.
My African-American contemporaries, products of the ‘60s,‘70s and even ‘80s who have succeeded in their chosen professions in spite of stereotypes that just won't die, will joke about us all being athletes, entertainers and, of course, so articulate. When we look at our kids, though, it just isn’t funny anymore. About ten months ago, when I started this blog, I wrote about “The Deeper Meaning of ‘Inexperienced’” in the context of all the campaign rhetoric. I said that several parents of color had told me about how shocked white parents – and sometimes teachers – can be at the intelligence of a brown-skinned child. They will gush with praise for his or her athletic abilities or performing talents, counting on them to make game-winning baskets and add some desperately needed rhythm to school musicals. Meanwhile, my daughter may be a real ham, but I have yet to see any signs of musical genius, and it appears that she may well be following in her mother’s clumsy footsteps. Her biggest talent is math; at 9, she dreads PE.
So come to think of it, forget being flattered: I’m downright proud to be able to add Michelle Obama to my list of mistaken identities. But if one more journalist refers to my “husband” as “basketball crazy…”
THE LEGEND OF THE SCARY BLACK MAN
Back in February, my husband urged me to write about a Scary Black Man moment that he had had outside our daughter’s school. These days, with recent events in Cambridge, Mass, the legend appears to be enjoying broader circulation, if not deeper discussion. Say what you will about Skip Gates, and what happened once the police arrived at his home, but the whole ordeal wouldn’t have taken place if some woman hadn’t immediately equated Gates’ brown skin with crime.
SO, on an especially freezing day last winter, my husband – who is actually a brown-skinned Latino – had been kind enough to offer to pick me up from a morning PA meeting, which of course ran long. Fortunately, there was a space just in front of the school, where he thought he would sit in the car, motor running and heat blasting, until I arrived. The sign said, “No Parking School Days, 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM,” but never mind: He was ready and willing to move if need be. A few minutes later, he looked up from whiling away the time on his iPhone to see the school’s head of security, a former NY police officer, approaching the car with his I’ll-get-this-guy walk, a white woman following close behind him. Recognizing my husband by the time he got to the car, he said, noticeably relieved, “Oh, it’s you,” and asked him to move so that the woman, a teacher, could park her own vehicle. Now granted, I don’t know what transpired to bring security out running into the cold, but I’m certain about one thing: It wouldn’t have happened if the man in the car had been white. I doubt if it even occurred to her that my husband could possibly have been a parent.
I’ve never taken a class in psychology, but I think it’s fairly safe to say that such behavior is Pavlovian, simple stimulus-and-response: See brown-skinned man, think trouble. Look at the madness whirling around the President these days. I once read about a study that found that white mothers, instinctively gripping the hands of their young children a little tighter, and maybe even crossing the street at the approach of a man of color, were conditioning their children to do the same, to feel fear and respond accordingly. And where do you think these mothers got it? This has been going on for generations.
Remember that wacky woman from Pennsylvania back in May, who did all sorts of bad things, including faking her own abduction by black men? That’s another thing that I’ve been wanting to write about. And I’m not going to get into the too-often tragic results of preconceptions on the part of the police. We had one of those, also in May, just a few blocks away from us.
Why do these things continue to happen? Look to the legend and Pavlov’s dogs. In increasingly diverse environments, such as the schools – and universities – that our children attend, it’s time to apply a little rational thinking, to look beyond legends. Ask Skip.
BOOK REPORT #1: TALLGRASS, by SANDRA DALLAS
At its very basic – and it was the very basicness of the plot and writing that turned me off – Tallgrass is a study in what happens in a relatively homogenous community when people who look different are introduced. There is inevitably a combination of curiosity and awkwardness, along with array of stock misconceptions – the “I-heard-thats” – from which flat-out hostility can often be just a step away.
Under the influence of her kinder, gentler, and unusually rational father, Loyal Stroud, the story’s heroine, Rennie (I’m not kidding about these names), predictably ends up befriending several residents of the “camp” called Tallgrass that sprang up next to the Stroud’s sugar beet farm in western Colorado. Sure, the relationship was born more of necessity than courage – with much of the usual farm labor enlisted, and only a bunch of Mexicans who could possibly fill their place, Loyal needed “good workers” to plant his beets – but the entire Stroud clan soon learned that the Japanese were in fact not so different from themselves.
Predictably, the Strouds were shunned by much of their community, but just as predictably, many of them eventually followed Loyal’s lead and came around to be at least tolerant. Those who did were greatly enriched by the experience. The End – almost.
I am not a big fan of coming-of-age novels in general, and if it weren’t for the recurring themes of rape and murder in this one – it was in fact a who-done-it, with all of the predictable faulty accusations – I would have imagined it being written for teenaged readers. It’s too bad that it wasn’t (unless, of course, that’s what teenagers are reading these days and I just don’t know about it): Despite all of the basicness, the story carried an important messages for a generation that could very well grow up ignorant of this and other blots on America’s “all men are created equal” rep. World War II may have been some 65 years ago now, but the Tallgrass experience still goes on in residential, corporate, social and school communities all the time. He may have had a goofy name, but it’s going to take all the Loyal Stroud’s we can get to ultimately make a difference.
ON INVISIBILITY: PART III - The Inauguration Edition
“Each day we go about our business,” she read, our new president looking wondrously presidential behind her, “walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.”
Or, I’d like to add, not doing anything…at all…ever.
A few weeks ago, I spoke with an African American mother, the friend of a friend, who is in the process of applying to schools for her daughter. Having already spent two years at an all-white preschool, a well-known bastion of Waspiness, she wondered if she was up for more of the same going forward. Her daughter had thrived there, she told me, but “of course there are parents who won’t speak. That’s the way they are, and that’s fine.”
No, it’s not fine. I had to admit to her that as much as I love my daughter’s school, and most of people in it, there are people, primarily other mothers, who for years now have not said “Boo!” to me, no matter how many times I have said, “Hello.” For a while, with a couple of the biggest offenders – the ones I see virtually every day and still nothing – it became a bit of a game, until one day I just gave up and decided not to acknowledge them, either. Maybe now that Obama is president I should try again: I’ll let you know how it goes.
Another mother once told me, shortly after her two children started at a private school in New York, “You’re in this weird zone. The parents don’t speak to you, because they think you’re a nanny; and the nannies don’t speak, because they know you’re not one of them.”
Okay, so we know that the Nanny Syndrome has a lot to do with it. But others are just rude, and yes, some people still have a hard time talking to black people. I also think that there’s something else going on in the subconscience of many otherwise decent souls: conditioned to believe that their owners couldn’t possibly know anyone one who doesn’t look like them, at least no one of consequence, their brains simply filter them out. They don’t see us; and sometimes, admittedly, we don’t see others.
I happen to know a lot of people, and as I “go about my business,” I am always on the lookout for one of them. It’s fun – well, most of the time – to run into old friends and colleagues, former classmates, fellow moms, people I’ve served on juries with, and even the women from the beauty shop. Plus, I am terrified of dissing them – well, most of them – by not at least smiling in recognition.
In his most recent TV special, Chris Rock does a bit praising our new president, saying that America has come a long way in electing him. To paraphrase, he says that, “My black friends now have a bunch of white friends. The white people I know now have one black friend.” Whatever your color, you just never know when you might find a friend. It’s actually how I met my husband, but that’s a story for another time.
Look up! Catch each other’s eyes! And for heaven's sake, speak!
ON INVISIBILITY: PART II
All Diversity Moms of color have to know just how that poor, neglected little bug feels. I certainly have asked the same question – for instance, when am in a store, talking with a salesperson, and a majority person jumps in with a question or order as if you’re not there. Heck, that happened to me just this morning when I went for coffee and tried to order a muffin to go with it. Or how about when you’re watching your child do some sort of activity and another mother slides in right in front of you so that she can watch hers?
A friend, who is Asian, told me about when she was eight months pregnant with her second child and went to pick up her son at some special high-priced art class. Waddling into the waiting area a few minutes early, she looked around, hoping for a place to sit. Not only were all of the chairs taken, the women sitting in them didn’t even look up. “They just stared straight ahead, no eye contact,” said my friend, “or they kept on chatting amongst themselves.” But then, when her son emerged from the classroom shouting “Mommy,” lo and behold the veils magically lifted from their eyes and “suddenly, all at once” – and far to late to be of any use – “four or five mothers offered up their seats.”
Years ago, I began to notice that no matter where I stood in a line – airport, bank, you name it – people always seemed to cut through it right in front of me. At first, I thought it was something in my demeanor, that maybe I came across as too meek, so I tried to put a little don’t-mess-with-me into my expression and stance. And still they consistently singled me out as the passageway, as if I were wearing an arrow. Intrigued by the regularity of this phenomenon, I started stepping close enough to kiss the person in front of me whenever I saw someone headed my way. At airports, I set my suitcase up as an obstacle; didn’t work. Rather than seek out another route, more often than not they would look momentarily perplexed, maybe say, “Excuse me, “ but always work their way through.
So really, what are we, invisible? Well, of course not. I can’t really speak for the others, but people definitely saw me in those lines. No, there’s something else at work in all of these cases that goes deeper, and this is my message, what I want people to wake up and understand is still happening. Like in the song from the ancient rock musical “Tommy,” sometimes I just want start singing: “See me, Feel me, Touch me, Heal me.” With my awful voice, someone might finally notice I’m there.