Art as a public expression of family dysfunction can go in a number of directions:  righteous indignation, raunchy rebellion, and weepy martyrdom are among these. Occasionally, someone actually transcends shock value and does something noteworthy.

I went to see “My Dad is Crazier Than Your Dad” last Friday for opening night of the NYC Fringe Festival. It’s a scientific-ish exploration of evidence cataloging the bizarre and increasingly cruel behavior of the performer/writer Katharine Heller‘s father. The stories can sting but are presented in such a way that  audience members leave invigorated from Katharine’s courage and hilarious candor.

Full disclosure: Katharine and I became best friends in high school. I know her well enough to know that she is brilliant. I’ve been more than proud of the dedication to her craft that she shows in everything she does. But I’ve never been prouder than I am of her for this show, her first one-woman endeavor and an open, honest window into the sometimes twisted but always intriguing canvas where she was created.

Katharine and I became friends when we were 14 which was, well, more than a little while ago.  We rode next to each other on a bus to attend a march for reproductive health. We both had single moms, were theater geeks on the Speech and Debate team at Bronx Science, had the same goofy sense of humor, cared about women’s rights, and had issues about our dads. Her father cut off communication with her several years before we met. Mine abandoned me and my mother when I was barely a toddler, and loomed over my childhood like a phantom antagonist.

Katharine has pulled off brilliant storytelling and impressive theatrical execution but, moreover, she makes damaged innocence and loss seem powerfully absurd. She delivers inspiration for each of us to disarm pain in our background and enjoy the comedy.

Here are the official showtimes. For tickets, click here and choose the date you’d like to attend.

Friday 8/13 at 7:00 pm
Saturday 8/14 at 12:00 pm
Friday 8/20 at 6:15 pm
Wednesday 8/25 at 4:15 pm
Friday 8/27 at 9:00pm

Dixon Place Theater 161A Chrystie Street (Rivington and Delancey Streets)

As a product of a liberal arts education, I have a healthy dose of critical thought coursing through my veins at all times. I can deconstruct and paradigm out with the best of them.

There have been times when I wondered if these skills might just be intellectual… er… self-gratification. But I have come to appreciate the doctrine of thinking broad and asking questions. Not only is it part of my nature (or nurture), but I’m fairly confident that appreciating fact-finding while not taking everything only at face value makes a person more balanced.

Going to business school flew in the face of this part of my world view. Many MBA curricula reinforce the notion that there are always right answers and that smart means you persevere to construct the right model to find them. That’s what makes management more science-y.

Are there right answers and straight lines in life? Yes. But more often than not, there aren’t.

I’ve expressed before on this blog my concern that such an approach produces manufactured and unimaginative thought. Tooliness, if you will. And have been studying a book by a Harvard Business School professor that reveals that people like me, now the outliers in business school, were once embraced by the MBA… er… paradigm (wow, this is the first time I wrote “paradigm” twice in one composition since undergrad).

Recently, the NY Times suggested that liberal arts staples like “multicultural critical theory” may once again become all the rage at post-financial-crisis-thanks-for-effing-up-the-economy-smarty-pants MBA programs. Everything old is new again.

The devastation in Haiti has many of us feeling that we must do something, be useful, however we can. People from the Haitian diaspora have been profoundly moved to action because their own families are in crisis. The rest of us are shaken by empathy and an inherent concern for human rights.

The question is what to do? Donate to relief, of course. But some of us would love to give so much more than our financial constraints allow. We know that we have skills and we would love if they could be put to use in a crisis. Perhaps we hope that doing so would give our professions and experience greater purpose.

Good intentions, good people… sign them up. What’s the problem?

Understandably, relief agencies are overwhelmed and not in any position to train hoards of disaster “newbies.” I’ve worked at enough resource-strapped non-profits myself to know that sometimes well-intentioned volunteers can make your busy day even harder, if they need lots of hand-holding.

I helped start a website for people like myself itching to be put to use, in the hopes that this could help streamline the process of matching people with appropriate skills to the organizations that can make the most constructive use of their time. Perhaps this could mitigate the flow of requests and organize them into something more structured when the time is right for the organizations.

I thought most people who joined this community might be like me, not at all contemplating an actual trip to Haiti but comfortable with the virtual world and willing to “get in where we fit in” from wherever we are. What we got was some of these types but also many, many people who were hoping to sign up for the next available flight.

Understandably, many relief experts caution against this. An under-prepared “vigilante” volunteer might do more harm than good and end up needing to be rescued themselves. However, a number of these potential volunteers are highly skilled and are realistic about the appropriate timeline for volunteering on the ground (i.e. longer term stints in the months/years following the immediate rescue crisis).

I am concerned about the commentary dismissing volunteers or characterizing them all as naive, misguided, humanitarian Rambos out to assuage their 1st world guilt. These are not fair generalizations and what is the constructive purpose of judging people who are inspired to lend themselves however they can without expecting financial gain? It also ignores the fact that a portion of these people are from the Haitian diaspora.

It would be far more useful for those who know the reality of development and disaster recovery to use their time, wisdom and experience to figure out ways to channel these would-be volunteers into something helpful (based on what they have to offer), rather than poo-pooing them from a pedestal.

Dear blog,

I apologize for neglecting you. You mean so much to me. My convoluted musings need a home and you’ve been great about giving them a couch to crash on.

Here’s why I’ve been away…

I’m working with a small web development shop. Actually, I co-founded this little web shop. We wanted to do something meaningful using our skills to help with Haiti relief. In our quest, we found some amazing techie types who were also moved to volunteer their time – including the awe-inspiring innovative crowdsourcing efforts of Ushahidi and Crisis Commons.

To make a long story short, our contribution is a web site that established a network between highly skilled people who want to volunteer to help Haiti and the organizations and individuals who can use their experience and talents. We felt desperate to do something to help and this was what we came up with.

The site has taken on a life of its own: thousands of visitors and hundreds of registered users. Now we’re hearing that people have used the site to connect with other volunteers and organizations, some even forming specialized teams that are planning ways to restore Haiti’s infrastructure in areas such as water and sewage engineering.

It’s a small contribution but we hope it helps. Sadly, it left me little time to think, let alone spend quality time with my blog. Hope you understand. I’m back…

Generations ago, housewives envied glamorous career women. Now career women envy glamorous housewives. What gives?

Donna Reed

Traditional housework is a demanding job. A good deal of it has been outsourced by manufacturing and commercial consumption. Now we have “light” home responsibilities.

Like lots of other people, these days I find myself wanting to be as environmentally responsible and healthy as possible. I’m learning the value of things like growing my own food, using alternative medicine, having a less toxic home, buying less, reusing more, cooking nourishing homemade meals… This is a lot to do.

Many of the things we think of now as “green” living were part of someone’s job. That person was also largely responsible for everything from childrearing to making soap. Clearly, this role is nothing like the lives of “Real/Desperate Housewives,” who make it seem luxurious and spoiled to be a housewife. This is real work.

Wage-earning spouses made out pretty well. In exchange for their financial contributions, they got a gardener, nanny, chef, tailor, housekeeper, barber, nutritionist, interior designer, events planner, etc.

Now I feel like women are trying to be superstars in outside careers and domestic goddesses at home. Even when we try to share responsibilities, in a male/female household, when your place and your kids are looking a mess, who usually ends up with the blame? The woman.

Women should have equal opportunities and never be forced to stay at home. But what is so bad about a single income household, where there is a wage-earner and someone else responsible for domestic responsibilities? I know that you’re probably thinking, “This is just a woman who envies glamorous housewives and is trying to legitimize that envy.” Maybe.

A new study finds that people project their personal beliefs upon the god they worship. An egocentric approach to devotion is probably to be expected. Even those of us who love to argue usually seek some sort of harmony when it comes to prayer. Yankees fans presumably don’t pray to a Red Sox god.

What I do wonder, which this study doesn’t capture, is if polytheistic religions (with more than one god) have the same issues or could they perhaps allow for more complexity. Also, if people are created in god’s image, maybe a there is an aspect of a macro-god that validates even our craziest contradictions.

I said I would blog about some of the interesting facts and insights that I am gathering while reading “From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession” by Harvard Business School’s Rakesh Khurana. Think of this as Sharda Cliff Notes.

Here’s one of them. On page 30, Khurana traces the origins of modern management theory to the industrial production process, where the relationship of management and workers as an extension of the relationship between engineers and machines. He cites the influence of Frederick W. Taylor’s ideology of “scientific management.”

Taylor’s methods essentially served to cast managers as the brains of organizations and workers as the brawn, inviting all of the hierarchical implications suggested by that model.

Khurana also mentions recent scholarship by Princeton’s Martin Ruef in the Department of Sociology. Ruef traces management relations from the 19th and 20th century to stategies to subdue and control slaves in the Roman Republic and antebellum south. How much of these approaches to we retain in management strategies of today? Many people do feel like slaves at work.

Visionary: somebody of unusually acute foresight and imagination

Tool: One who lacks the mental capacity to know he is being used.

I graduated from an MBA program this year. It was an unconventional route for the likes of me: someone with a ten year track record of being a human rights proponent. MBA and human rights don’t normally break bread together. When business crosses paths with human rights advocates, it’s often at the wrong end of an angry press release. I went looking for a new bag of tricks for innovative thinking. I wanted to get outside of my box but are MBA programs poised to break new ground or are they just a different kind of box?

I’ve been reading “From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession” by Harvard Business School’s Rakesh Khurana. I would seriously recommend this book for every MBA, especially those who fall into the “unconventional” bucket like myself.

Beach reading, it ain’t. It’s way more academic and dense than the typical MBA article/case but it’s brilliant and thorough. Presumably most MBAs will never bother to wade through it and many have zero curiosity about the social transformations and controversies that created the modern MBA curriculum. But that might just prove the author’s thesis: MBA programs have deviated from their original purpose of producing thoughtful intellectual leaders with broad business acumen, and instead have become vocational factories for corporate managers.

He has some good points. I’ll share as many as possible on future blog posts because, like I said, not everyone likes to read 500+ pages on this kind of thing. One of them relates to me as a liberal arts college graduate. We’re a bit against the grain in business school. We like controversies, critical thinking and chasing interesting experiences (even when we don’t get paid for it).

Turns out MBAs were originally conceived as liberal arts poster children. Instead of learning formulaic thought, they were supposed to ask probing questions and think different. Is this true for MBA programs today? If not, what does the change from “higher aims” to “hired hands” indicate about contemporary business leadership?

After I had a few days to simmer down and get constructive criticism from my friends (some who thought angry asanas and blog posts were passive aggressive), I wrote a letter to my yoga studio about the teacher with the Columbus affection.

I am a customer in this relationship and, at the end of the day, should be offering honest feedback. This is probably more useful than festering with resentment. I’m still glad that I didn’t say anything in the moment.  I was way too upset. Let me know what you think of how I handled the situation. Here tis…

I am a regular student at your studio but never took a class with X until this past Sunday. Please pass the message to her that Christopher Columbus is a sensitive topic for many people. He helped lead the violent conquest of indigenous people and enslaved Africans. Although new nations in the Americas were born from this process, Columbus’ legacy is difficult for those who are also mourning and remembering his brutality.

Ms. X should be more careful about the themes and analogies that she uses in class, so as not to alienate her students or make them uncomfortable. I was extremely disturbed that she chose to decide for us that we would honor Christopher Columbus with our practice. Imagine, for example, asking descendants of slaves to honor the slave traders who brought their ancestors to this continent.

She didn’t just use Columbus once but referenced him throughout class. Even though I tried my best to focus on my practice, it was weird, disturbing, unnecessary and ruined my experience.

Please ask her to be more mindful of her students and remember to be sensitive to the fact that her hero might inspire very different emotions in others. I would not ever choose to welcome Christopher Columbus into my yoga practice in this manner.

At one point, Ms. X congratulated me on pushing myself in class and honoring Christopher Columbus. I can’t tell you how angry this made me. She then asked why people don’t honor him more these days?

Please read below from Columbus’ log and ask yourself how appropriate it is to relentlessly laud this man in a yoga class:

“They brought us barrels of cotton thread and parrots and other little things which it would be tedious to list, and exchanged everything for whatever we offered them…I kept my eyes open and tried to find out if there was any gold, and I saw that some of them had a little piece hanging from a hole in their nose. I gathered from their signs that if one goes south, or around the south side of the island, there is a king with great jars full of it, enormous amounts. I tried to persuade them to go there, but I saw that the idea was not to their liking…They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

Just because it’s a legal holiday, doesn’t mean that I have to celebrate it.

Today I took a yoga class with a teacher I’d never learned from before. She told us that the theme of our class would be “exploration,” in honor of Christopher Columbus. That was a weird moment for me, in the middle of a room where I seemed to be one of few… actually, I might have been the only “non-white” person.

I thought about leaving right then and there. I figured that I’d already been offended, was pretty sure that I would have a tough time concentrating on yoga, and the heated room was not going to help me cool down.

For years, I was self-taught in yoga. I was serious but avoided classes because I thought it might have too many awkward moments. I may be only quasi-Indian (half black American and raised with little or no Indian culture) but it’s still weird to be in a room full of white people chanting in Sanskrit… or having a Western yoga teacher know more than me.

I got over it, and started taking classes – for the most part, really enjoying them and improving my practice. I would have even enjoyed today’s class for the poses themselves, but not for the commentary on Christopher Columbus. The class was well beyond  awkward; it was infuriating to the point of rage. I was practicing enraged yoga, which was paradoxical but motivating. My poses were deeper than usual. I imagined each of them as a big middle finger to the teacher.

You see, Christopher Columbus, was an explorer widely credited with helping Europe find and conquer the Americas. How you feel about him has everything to do with whether you identify more with the aggressors or the people who resisted the invasion. Some look at him and give thanks for the victory and other’s… well, not so much.

In the path of his conquest, many indigenous and African people were killed. A good number of us in the United States count those massacred among our ancestors or we empathize with their plight. True, we are also descended from Europeans and have a new national identity as part of the U.S. But we’re still connected to the memory of the atrocities.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, a scholar and author of several books related to Columbus, including “1492: The Year the World Began,” said in the Associated Press recently, “Every hero is somebody else’s villain.” Part of me knows that my life is the legacy of Columbus. But that part is overwhelmed by sadness over the bloodshed caused by his “discovery” of the new world.

Even if my yoga teacher meant no harm–and it was just a coincidence that she happened to look right at me when she referred to Columbus being “open” to the “natives” — it still felt painful and humiliating to be in that situation. I was not getting any kind of bliss.

I imagined myself marching out in disgust, maybe slamming the door on my way out. But this was a yoga class. That would look extra crazy, as would cursing, spitting or any of the other things I felt like doing. Maybe this was just some sort of cosmic test for my ability to concentrate and continue with my practice.

After all, she wouldn’t bring up Christopher Columbus again would she? Yup, she did. Again and again. Among the most difficult moments, she said:

- to squat and reach our hands in an offering, like the native people to Columbus
- explore our poses like we were exploring the new land
- lift our knee up high like we were posing at Plymouth Rock
- do three versions of camel and the boat pose in honor of the Nina, the Pinta and Santa Maria
- when I did the full camel pose, “Good for you. Really pushing and honoring Christopher Columbus. People don’t celebrate him much these days. I wonder why…” (I eff you not)

Anyway, you get the picture. It went on and on… for the entire class. I would have been annoyed at seeing any analogy pimped this gratuitously but Columbus? The Indian killer, apologist for slavery, and ruthless opportunist? Really? In a yoga class? At the same studio with this quote in the women’s bathroom: “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace. – Jimi Hendrix”? Yoga class isn’t supposed to make one leave in serious need of a stiff drink.