REALitY

So this was my reality growing up, this is what shaped my worldview…

I spent my formative years, prancing around a pretty much all white (at the time) suburb of Flint, Michigan called Grand Blanc. Yes, that translates to Big White. It can also mean Large Nothing, depending on how many languages you speak. It was a spanking new suburb with baby trees and cul-de-sacs and a local swimming club just a stone's throw from our house. That’s where I learned to swim. We had a swing set in our backyard and a teepee where my brother took part in Indian Guide activities – like Boy Scouts, except they all wore feathers on headbands instead of scarves around their necks. I suppose this was an attempt to rebrand the horrors that had been committed to the actual, original Americans. Playing cowboys and Indians was a thing when I was young and impressionable. My take-away? Cowboys are bullies. If we had only assimilated in a gentler way with Native Americans, perhaps we would not be facing such a global environmental crisis.

My childhood was all about subtle and seemingly innocuous programming at the time. I got my own kitchen for Christmas. A complete kitchen set with a stove, a sink, and a refrigerator, and all the plastic accessories to go with it. They even made little fake cardboard box replicas of cereal boxes and cake mixes for tiny little hands. And those pretend little plastic “cans” with paper labels on them were disappointing because you couldn’t actually open them up. There wasn’t anything inside. It was all for play and display! I was set up for happy homemaking by the age of four. Enough said.

We slid down our roof into huge snowdrifts, and picked apples in what seemed like a forest down the street. It was probably just an empty lot. Our neighborhood was perfect and magical, and I hadn't even heard of the word “harm”. My only recollection of violence was the Road Runner rigging a contraption that would annihilate Wiley Coyote in a cartoon on TV. But sturdy old Wiley would always manage to peel himself off the pavement and shake it off, over and over again. So that was my lesson in resilience.

My dad's idol was Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian anthropologist and adventurer, who took a balsa tree raft across the South Seas on his Kon-Tiki expedition, and lived to write about it. My dad was really big on adventure and decided to move us to France when he took a promotion from Buick to General Motors Overseas. My father was Norwegian too, so I suppose that moving overseas was a step in the Thor Heyerdahl direction. We took the longest passenger ship ever built, at the time, when we got on the SS France in New York. We ate in fine dining rooms with the captain and watched fun puppet shows in the playroom. The SS France had carried the Mona Lisa from Le Havre to New York in 1962, the year I was born, to embark on an American tour. The magnificent vessel then carried little Lisa in 1968 to embark on a tour of her own new home in Strasbourg, France.

There, I grew up in the north half of a three-story mansion with a huge wall down the middle and a big rose garden in the backyard. I went to an all-girls French school across from an all-boys Jewish school. We all spoke French, and ate crêpes and roasted chestnuts. Dad took us all over France, exploring castle ruins and World War II bunkers. We went to lots of museums, and perhaps a few art galleries, but maybe that was just my imagination because everything looked beautiful and aesthetic and fancy and historic compared to the next place we moved, Manila, Philippines.

Can you imagine moving from France to the Philippines at 10 years old? That was extreme culture shock, which I have spent my entire life recovering from. The house we lived in was palatial enough, with its parquet floors and polished stone, almost marble-like walls. We had our very own swimming pool and coconut tree. But right outside the gates of Dasmariñas Village, an exclusive subdivision where American and overseas officials lived, there were cardboard and tin shacks sheltering people who couldn’t afford to live in those environments. So, while they technically weren't homeless, let's just say that their homes were, well, more like camping with crates and boxes, and no plumbing to be found anywhere. High temperatures and intolerable humidity compounded the unavoidable stench. Then there was monsoon season. The rest of the neighborhood would be flooded and cleansed by torrential downpours while we were well sheltered in our sturdy homes. I don't know how they didn't all die of malaria, but the disparity of wealth was unconscionable. Back in the day, the word homeless was barely part of the American vocabulary. Now it has become the American Nightmare.

During my teenage years in the Philippines we took boat trips to islands on the weekends. My dad joined the yacht club, and bought a cabin cruiser he named Drip Dry. We snorkeled around beautiful, blazing coral reefs and slept on the roof of the boat under a gazillion stars. That was my reality. Extremes! And then one day I met Andy Warhol at his art factory in New York, and then Warren Beatty in his bedroom in Los Angeles. Reality as anyone would have me believe, just flew out the window.