Modern Love: In Search for My Palestinian Family

Modern Love: In Search for My Palestinian Family

A Star Is Born

A Star is Born

Lilly had been living her airy-fairy life down at the beach, as per usual, for as long as she could remember. Then, for a while, she had gone up to the mountains to hibernate, and on her way back down, she was discovered, just like those actresses of old in LaLaLand.

She was wearing her least favourite silver slip-on shoes that Alexi had advised her to buy for when her sister wasn’t there to tie her shoe-laces. And her newly cut fluffy-chicken haircut was sticking firmly in the air when a girl with a camera asked if she could interview her post-hike.

And so Lilly warbled on for twenty minutes about why she liked hiking, which, if the truth be known, she only liked because it had been raining loud and heavy one day, and so she had gone to the mountains to escape the hordes. And then it was because the guru had gotten so busy building a new house that he could no longer accompany her of a Sunday which is when she thought all gurus went to rest.

In any case, Lilly had been visiting her relatives in Berlin where she had used to live – and showed them a dark underground museum where a monster-maker slept every night with his monsters - when she received the call.

She was to return forthwith for a starring role in an online hiking campaign for a large American drugstore called Wallbeans.

Lilly had just been swimming when she head the message and was feeling rather odd to be back in her old stomping ground where she had once lived, and thought it sounded like the perfect plan to escape. And so she went online and booked her ticket home. And then she spent a day at her daddy’s house in England, and then she missed his party and went home to the beach.

The guru was busier than ever, and so while Lilly waited for her starring-role, she went to some parties for the Oscars. As it so happened, she had been anointed by the Queen of England to attend a rained-out garden party at the British consulate for the nominees for The King’s Beach, which was a film from England. At the party, she saw Ms. Helena Bonham Carter, who, like Lilly, had also been to Berlin, cos Lilly had seen her reveal her bossom there to the crowds there. And then she spoke to a man who said he was the Deputy British Ambassador to the United States, and spent most of his days speaking to President Bobama about furthering British interests. Lilly had decided that he was just an actor until the very next day she saw the film’s director, Mr. Tom Blooper, receiving the prize for the best film award on stage. The ambassador must have spent an awfully long time talking to the president, she thought.

The next day, she was to begin her own film career. And so she went to the mountains for her call-time of 9.30, wearing her finest pink jacket and gold-sequined Converse boots. And then, she told the camera people how, when she wasn’t hiking, they fitted perfectly with her Diane Von Furstenburg Wonder woman dress and her black pirate’s eye patch. And then they filmed her holding her shoes next to her face to encourage more people to go hiking, and then they told her she would be online April 7. Then Lilly went home. And then Lilly wrote a story on luxury and religion, which her editor said she was killing. And then Lilly went to bed having told her editor she wasn’t killing anything ‘cos she was now a Buddhist. She didn’t quite understand.

The Princess and The Racehorse

Purveyors of the ancient art of declaring which animal a person would have been, had they been an animal, had often declared Lilly to be an Arabian race horse, all jittery when it had to wait its turn to race around the track.

But the truth was that Lilly was actually an Arabian princess, left in England by her father as a young child. This was a fact that had been lost on most, due to the fact that Lilly had been raised in England by worker bees, on account of which Lilly told her real family upon meeting them, one recent weekend, that she felt like Mooglie in the Jungle Book, in other words a boy child raised by apes. But as the guru always said, the truth shall be revealed. And so it was that one recent weekend, Lilly took a plane to meet her real family who had become acquainted to her through the Internet on Facebook and through a miracle. It turned out that her real family, also all princes and princesses, were textile merchants from the Holy Land who had lived everywhere from Tokyo to Mumbai. They had lived exotic lives but not as exotic as Lilly’s, she thought. Lilly had met them all at a wedding of one of her cousins where aunts and uncles bustled around making cups of tea, as long lost relatives were introduced to the fact that Lilly did really exist. She had long been nothing more than a rumor to many of these folks, a figment of their imagination. But now, dear reader, Lilly was for real. So Lilly met them all and then she went back home and met some more of her real family. In-between the emails flying back and forth around the planet, confirming her existence to upper class Arabs everywhere, Lilly had a duel with a cat named Jeep. Jeep slept above Lilly’s bed in the laundry room of the main house where she would meow each night and where her neighbors would stomp around feeding the cat at dawn. It got Lilly thinking that she should go hiking at sunrise and sleep with the sunset. But she just wasn’t yet an early bird. So late one afternoon, Lilly wrote a story about her new family who came from places like Nazareth, and included also a nun in Bethlehem, to submit to The New York Rhymes in the hope that she could become a famous writer and live in her own palace and not be disturbed. She thought, also, that this way she could become a writer for real, and not just for newspapers, and no longer have to water the guru’s plants or be nice to Jeep. Her new family invited her to lots of exciting places from Chile to Amman and she had also been invited to Tokyo by a filmmaker, so she figured she should also learn some Japanese while she waited for her new story to be published and her new life to begin.

The return of Lilly to LaLaLand

Lilly had decided to come back by sea from the Festival de Cannes – dear reader, this may be a metaphor for the fact that she had been out at sea, since then – so it had taken an awfully long time to get home. Before she left, she had interviewed all sorts of nice people, including the Hungarian actor Stellan Skarsgard, who smelled like a daisy, and an Indian actress Aishwarya Rai. When Lilly said to Mrs. Rai that it must be awfully tiring to do so many interviews, she said, “Yes, it is. But that’s quite alright.” And then she left. What Lilly remembered most from the interview was that Mrs. Rai had such lovely skin. Lilly vowed to use cleanser every day until the next Cannes, in honor of Ash, as she was known. She also got to interview Ash’s husband whose name she couldn’t pronounce. Abhishek Bachchan wore a bright red jacket as bright as his star was in India. Ash and her husband behaved so impeccably that they put the journalists to shame. Two had engaged in a cat fight even almost in their presence. The guru came and went to a premiere in Cannes where everyone thought he was Wong Kar Wai in his shades. And then he accompanied her back across the pond.

When they got back, she found her daddy waiting for her wearing a striped jacket from an English horse race event and a cowboy hat. And so she showed him all around California and then he went home. It was time to get back down to business. She wrote to her Arab newspaper to see if they would like a follow up piece to find out what had happened to the long lost Arab film director last seen at Samuel Goldwyn, Jr.’s house. And then she phoned Mr. Goldwyn, Jr. who invited her to lunch. He asked her to bring her friend who was an important editor. They talked shop for a very long time and Lilly thought it an honor that she got to listen. They talked about a looming strike and who would buy Miramax and what had become of MGM. And then they talked about the Dover Sole and a script writing competition that Mr. Goldwyn, Jr. and his daddy had been organizing for an awfully long time. And then they talked about rights and libraries and their favorite showbiz execs, and it was all as if nothing had ever changed for a million years. MGM was always for sale and someone or other in Tinseltown was always about to strike. And then when her editor friend left, Mr. Goldwyn, Jr. gave Lilly some sound advice: “If you can’t access the stars here then just make it up,” he said. Sit at the beach and piece things together. Lilly told him a big secret. “That is what all foreign reporters do here,” she said. Then she drove back to the guru’s who had left a vacuum cleaner for her to clean with, as she had brought in sand from the beach. It lay all over the floor. And there was a towel to wipe down the outside table where her flowers stood. She wasn’t sure it was quite the welcome she had expected after being wined and dined in Hollywood by very important people but she figured it was all part of the training. As she didn’t know if there would still be newspapers a year from now, she figured she had better do as she was told. Being naughty could wait another day.

Lilly In Hiding

Having never stayed in one city before for longer than ten weeks, Lilly had decided that the best plan was to go into hiding. For several weeks at the crack of dawn, which happened to be around 10 a.m. each morning she would drive to her new office, which happened to be the guru's garden in the Palisades. Here she would sit amid the pretty pink flowers as the Mexian builders played Mariachi music and yelled at each other whilst constructing the guru's new mansion at the back of his garden and then she would pee in the corner near the mint leaf plants, like a cat who was sick and wanted to go to sleep. All along Lilly asked herself if she had gone mad as the routine continued and each day she went to hide in her new Jardin.
Working in the morning meant sitting on the paving stones and the doormat leading into the guru's treatment room. Then when the sun moved, she would move to the terrace table and then when the builders left, she would swim. She would get home at 10 p.m. like a real person with an office and she would light her candles and stare at the ocean and then go to sleep.
The routine continued for several weeks until the Volcano errupted in Iceland and she wondered if she might be trapped in LaLaLand for several weeks more. But the pilot wasn't having it and so she and another 200 passengers were allowed to escape the madness and fly to the Riviera where she instantly felt more at home. It was the annual Cannes Film Festival and the prospect of spending ten days asking film stars banal question and hot-footing it from one party to the other felt much more real than life in the suburbs a la the Pacific Palisades. And so it was that after two nights in a 2 Star Hotel, her sanity was restored. The lady at the new Farmer's Market yelled at her the next morning for wanting too small a slice of pate and so she knew too that she was safely back home in Europe.
And then the next night, she put on her best dress, which as avid readers will know, is her Diane von Furstenburg Wonder Woman dress, which she wore this time without her gold sequined Converse boots, as she knew fine well that the mean men at the bottom of the red carpet in Cannes would not let her up the stairs wearing sneakers. At the top of the stairs in her Prada shoes, she met Cate Blanchett who admired her gold sequined bag from the thrist store on Main Street and gave her a great big smile.
And then she went to dinner at the pizza place with some film agents and talked to a man who was making a film about the life of Budhha and some book agents who had taken the train from London. She told them about her novel Sergeant Pepper. And then she went to a party for Robin Hood with a man dressed as Robin Hood. And then she went home to sleep.

I'm Alice In Wonderland

Ever since that day when I had gotten to wander around the red carpet before the Oscars, watching golden statues being unveiled from large plastic wrappers and heaps of rolled-up carpet being laid out for the stars, I had come to think of my life as being just like Alice in Wonderland. This particular epiphany had come to me courtesy of Walt Disney. Tim Burton’s 3-D version of the film was playing at Disney's El Capitain Theater, which overlooked the Oscar ceremony walk-up on Hollywood Boulevard. A poster for the film, showing some weird-looking characters with green hair, looked down as the statues stood there naked. It was with this Alice theme in mind one recent Sunday morning, that I left my beach house, which stood next to the Santa Monica Pier, and wandered down to the shoreline in search of some wisdom of the Alice in Wonderland kind. I found it on Venice Board Walk, which I had also been thinking about and declared to be a place where the chaos of life is manifested in the most colorful of forms. Think one-legged hoola-hop dancers, pot-smoking doctors and artists of the tres bizarre kind. There was even a store selling Native American paraphernalia, which I walked inside. Instead of the scruffy-looking student wearing Hiawatha T-shirts, I imagined Indians dancing through the store to the sounds of the powerful pipe music, which came from a CD called nothing other than Drum Sex! Back outside on the walkway, I sought the wisdom of a tarot card reader who spent half of the session figuring out how to get her son from London to Liverpool by train once she heard my British accent. Still, she did tell me that I had managed successfully to slay some dragons in recent weeks. I did hope she was right as the guru had been after some very dragon-like women recently, and I didn’t much like having them around. (I had struck them off all of his class lists.) That afternoon I wandered to the pool, and seeings as it was Spring Break there were lots of children swimming. There was also a man who had asked me out on several dates. When I said at the top of my voice, so that he could hear me over the squeals, that I was sorry that I hadn’t been able to screw him, he said, “hush.” And then he said, “Do meet my wife.” From there I thought that it was best to go to dance class at the Brazilian studio in Ocean Park. Then I went up to the guru’s who had gone to Tokyo, and watered his plants. I practiced my new samba moves in his evergreen garden under a full moon, which loomed large in the sky, and then I laid down under the stars and breathed into the cosmos, just like he had told me. Then I went home to slay more dragons. These particular dragons happened to be my landlords who had said that they wanted to move back into my little studio home. I looked out the window at the most blissful view I knew, which was of the distant waves washing into shore, beyond the tall palm trees, standing under the stars shining all silver in the deep blue sky. The waves were lit up in a luminous turquoise and then green for a moment, by the reflection of the big wheel, which was hidden from view on the Santa Monica Pier. And I imagined for a moment that I was in South Pacific.

Back To Work: Oscars, Mansions and Filmmakers

It was on account of the fact that I had read something about there being the greatest recession since the great recession, that I decided it was time to go back to work. I didn’t want to admit it to myself but I thought that probably the fact that I had been doing water aerobics with the old ladies at 9.15 each morning, instead of being a worker bee, had something to do with it. And so I decided to give class a miss and get down to it. I got to the pool the next morning at 7 a.m. upon which I had to mingle with all of those morning people who were all bright and cheery and couldn’t wait to engage in conversation. I pretended that I was a shire horse with blinkers on and that I couldn’t see them. Pool men were diving in their underwear to look for Cynthia’s long lost earings which she would wear to the pool and lose almost everyday. Beach boys were laying out striped towels and a man was pretending to trim the palm tree, except that I knew it was a fake. As I passed the old ladies on the way out, I got to tell them the temperature of the pool, which was always the biggest news about these parts (once a journalist always a journalist), and then I set off to work. I walked right along the shoreline carrying my laptop under one hand as the surfers wandered by carrying their boards under the other. I passed a sound man who walked across the vast stretch of sand, carrying a large microphone in one hand and a recorder in the other. When I got to Venice Beach, I headed up Rose Avenue to look for Marisco’s Mexican food van, which had been recommended to me by none other than the chef from the Four Seasons. I ate a taco and sat down at the Rose café to do some work. I already had one assignment to track down a long lost Arab filmmaker known to be hiding somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. His name was Flamingo Ryan and he was thought to be hiding in the Goldwyn Mansion, which Sam Goldwyn, Jr. insisted wasn’t true. Just to be on the safe side, I headed back along the beach jumped in my car and drove around the hills asking everyone I saw if they had seen Mr. Ryan. As I approached the Goldwyn Mansion, I saw a man in a long dress and seven women in belly dancing gear sneaking around the side entrance. Supersleuth Lilly had done it again. I approached Ryan with my voice recorder and he broke down in tears and said he hadn’t been seen in public since his last film had made only $300 at the U.S. box office four years ago. I assured him that it was quite alright and gave him and his entourage a lift to the airport. He said he was going back to Palestine to be part of the new Palestinian film movement. That evening I headed to the Four Seasons Hotel where I met a composer called Maury Yeston who had written the musical Nine. $100 worth of champagne later, we were riding the elevator up and down, opening his Vanity Fair invite multiple times just to make those who didn’t have one jealous. The next day it was the Oscars and so I climbed in my car once again and got to the red carpet at 10 a.m. to watch the set up. Men in jeans were still rolling out piles of carpets and placing flower pots around the edges of the entrance, as presenters in long dresses gave Oscar pep talks to distant audience. I took a photo of a giant Oscar statue being unwrapped from its wrappers and interviewed some of the audience and left to pick up a Pink’s Hotdog to take to the guru. As the presenters were hanging around for hours on the carpet, we went hiking and did Chigong in the middle of the park and then pretended we were in the film Jules et Jim and rolled around on the grass. Then we did what any sensible person does and watch the ceremony on television whilst eating Indian for dinner.