Notes for Olympia Dukakis
After reading her memoir, Ask Me Again Tomorrow
Greek Heroes
Olympia! I did not read your book. It was a life experience for me. I inhaled it, like a yummy Greek delicacy, delivered to my personal table.
At this time, when the implosions of the Greek economy have contributed to an international crisis of epic propotions, it was more than helpful to discover your story and be reminded of the Glory that can be Greeks. While some are admittedly taking siestas, their watches set to "Greek Time" when they should be paying their income taxes, the honest, hard-working majority of Greeks and the Greek diaspora are punctually contributing and innovating in diverse arenas.
Your story proves that endurance and hard work are as necessary to Success as talent.
Last night I discovered that the man who said "Bernie Madoff's not for real" and proved it was Harry Markopolos, heroic and stoic Greek-American born and raised in Erie, Pennsylvania.
While working at a Boston investment firm as CFA and CFE, he launched his investigation into Madoff's international, 20 billion dollar Ponzi scheme. His book, titled
No One Would Listen, refers to his frustration when, for nearly a decade, he delivered ever-increasing evidence to the SEC and the press and no action was taken to stop Madoff.
Markopolos is a very modest, diligent, ingenious man in his forties with thinning hair and an Army background. He mentioned (in the documentary, "Chasing Madoff") that because he was smaller than everyone else competing in high school sports, his philosophy became, "I don't mind losing. You just have to show up."
He continues in his career as a professional whistleblower who investigates the biggest "big boy" frauds. (Madoff's profits were made possible by support he received from more than 30 investment professionals and institutions.)
Are Dukakises Tall?
Or, are they
not short? If so, that may explain why height is not a dominant theme of your memoir. My father, who was 5’9”, was at times preoccupied with height. He never failed to mention that although his mother was tall his father was not. His father resembled “a cigar store wooden Indian” and spoke like an Indian: “Customer want baklava”, etc.
When he met a person, specifically a male person, my father would find his way to the height theme. If this person was taller than he was, he would ask how tall they were. Then, he would request that they stand side by side, both lifting an arm to demonstrate the inevitable: my father's arms were the longest. John Doukas said he had the arms of “an orangutan”, which explained his success on the basketball courts of inner-city Washington, DC, where he was born and grew up.
And, one thing about Michael Dukakis: if he had been elected president, I would’ve spent my life spelling out my last name and having people nod and respond: “Right,
Dukakis.” Throughout your cousin’s campaign for the presidency I would explain to deaf ears that our names were different. I might also go into detail: our name means “Duke” and your name means something like “Little Duchy.”
I have also read that the diminuitive “akis” ending was assigned to Greek names by Turkish occupiers as a form of humiliation.
In any case, having a Northeastern liberal Greek-American Democrat (and an honest man) in the White House, after the embarrassment of Spiro T. Agnew, would have been consolation enough for me.
Greek Noses and Nose Jobs
Olympia! There were so many teenage Greek-American girls who thought their noses were too big and/or crooked and had nose jobs like yours that it never occurred to me, when I encountered one of these noses, that they (or you) had had a nose job. My impression was that these were an elegant, distinctive type of Greek nose.
In fact, after growing up among altered and unaltered Greek noses, my opinion is that many Asian and Northern European noses are way too small. Seriously: how do people breathe through nasal passages that tiny?
When my gorgeous youngest sister moved to Los Angeles, long ago, she was advised to consider plastic surgery so she could be cast in roles other than ethnic roles. It is a relief that now there is far more non-stereotypical TV and movie casting of formerly so-called ethnic actors. And, more actors keep original, ethnic names and do not need to live in fear (as you mention) that they’d be asked if they spoke English.
The Name Alec
Olympia, if it's not too obvious, I wonder if your mother’s name was Alec because she was one of five daughters and her parents were pining for a son?
Although, as the firstborn daughter I was named the traditional way, after my father’s mother, before I was born my father would place his hand on my mother’s belly and insist I was John Michael Doukas, Jr. According to my mother, he believed, as one of four sons, that he could only produce sons.
If my mother can be believed, my father's first-choice name for me was John Michael, even after I was born. She insisted a girl couldn’t be saddled with her father’s name. So they eventually went the traditional route, compromising on my middle name, which is Joan, after John.
My three sisters (all younger) (correct: no sons) received names that resemble male names: Andrea (Andrew?), Erika (Erik?), and Nike (Nick!). In fact, my mother gave Erika the name Nancy, after a close friend who was a New Englander, but as an adult Erika experimented and researched and committed to a name with a Greek derivation. It was a good fit.
Believe it or not, not for the first time, I recently heard myself exploring whether to change my name to Johnny, although I have never, never mentioned this internal debate to anyone ... Would a masculine name be my way of asserting that some daughters are almost equal to, maybe better than, sons?
Most interesting is that in Greek, when people speak about their sons they use the word for child and when they speak of their daughters they use the word for girl. So a person might say I have three children and a girl, if they had three sons and a daugher. Painful.
Kefti
Olympia, you wrote about your mother: “She had what Greeks refer to as the quality of
kefti, the spirit of exuberant living.” Even though I grew up evesdropping on Greek spoken by my parents and their parents and siblings, I don't remember the word
kefte. I wonder if this is because your family and mine were from different times and places and might've therefore had different styles of Greekness.
I first started to think about the differences among Greeks comparing two grandmothers: my maternal grandmother, Vasso Anastos of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the paternal grandmother of my Fitchburg, Massachusetts cousins, Ellen Baimas.
Ellen was called
Yiayia (emphasizing the first syllable); she wore floral prints in nice bright colors and made generous, curled-up mitten-size rustic meatballs (
keftedes) and Easter cookies (
koulourakia). The Baimases were from Langadia, a remote village like a steep flight of stairs that ran up the side of a mountain, with tiny houses built into each step. She was a sturdy, plain-spoken (OK, opinionated) matriarch, proud of her family and community.
Vasso was called
Yiayia (emphasizing the second syllable); she wore black dresses with the hem at mid-calf and shiny black lace-up shoes. In her sunny, plant-filled kitchen, she made tidy little urban
keftedes and
koulourakia. She had been a schoolteacher in Patras, a seaport. She was permanently homesick for Greece, it seemed. She was also very proud of her professional credentials and demanding and critical of her children--athough, Eleni, the firstborn, was the favorite.
Both Ellen and Vasso were widows, each had five children although Ellen adopted a sixth child from her village. They both lived out their lives in the big houses their husbands had provided.
The thing is, like leprechauns and shamrocks for Irish-Americans, it seems that many Americans are sentimental about traditions from which the Old World has long since moved on. Not everyone does River Dancing in Ireland; like all Europeans, Greeks are dancing to contemporary Afro-Caribbean, American and Euro music and they are typically dancing in hip, contemporary clothes.
Greek dancing is great but my feelings about it are mixed—not merely because I have great difficulty memorizing the steps …
Mythology vs. Orthodoxy
Olympia, it interests me so much that you found your way to the Goddess and Goddess studies. Like you (it seems), I was never completely persuaded by the Church.
What I mean is: for me, it was those women in hats, gossiping about the hats other women were wearing. More positively, it was those weekday afternoons in Greek school, where we learned to read and write Greek by studying the ancient myths. Then, we’d return to the same church basement classrooms for Sunday school and discuss bible stories that seemed to me like an equivalent, less ancient form of mythology.
(Option for a rainy day: compare and discuss the torments of Prometheus with lighter-weight American mythological figures—Santa, Easter Bunny, Paul Bunyan.)
From family stories, I knew church was the engine or glue or communal hearth of the immigrant Greek community. Marriages could be arranged there. Money was raised. The men stood on the steps after services, trading business cards and favors. However, my father said he didn’t like all the back slapping and said he couldn’t afford to offer special Greek rates for his services to Greek clients (although I think he did).
Some Sundays during the Vietnam War, as we headed for Watertown, zipping past the white Unitarian church on Lexington Green, my mother would say there was a great anti-war speaker visiting the Unitarians that morning but we were bound for Watertown because that was Yiayia’s church; unthinkable, to leave the Orthodox faith.
Xenophobia
Olympia, when your mother waited at the window for your father’s late night return, you didn’t know he was out with other women. When you found this out, as an adult, I wonder if you ever knew whether your father’s women were “Greek” or “American”, i.e., foreign or
xeni? (Do all immigrants identify the local community as xeni?)
My mother’s brother, my uncle Ted, was the bachelor son who, until he married in his forties, was alone with his mother after everyone else had left home or died. (When he married, his wife joined the household.)
During his bachelor years, if Ted was out all Saturday night on a date, Yiayia refused to allow him to drive her to church on Sunday morning, saying something like this: she was ashamed be seen with him and he should not show his face in church, everyone would know he had been out all night consorting with women who were xeni.
Ted would say that his father’s view of relations with American women went like this: “They’ll go with you and everything will be beautiful but then one day they’ll turn on you and say: ‘Get out of here, you God-damn Greek!’”
When I was in college, the boyfriend of a girlfriend of mine offered me a lift back to school after a break. As we were loading my things into the back of his station wagon, my tiny Yiayia tore out of the house in her black widow’s garb of two decades and accosted us, in her very rare English: “Please, Thalia, for my sake! Marry a nice Greek boy!” (Did she think we were eloping?) As I protested, her selective deafness kicked in and she shook her head and woefully made her way back up the driveway repeating: “
Then ah-coo-aw! (i.e., “I can’t hear you! I can’t hear a word!”)
I remember trying not to sound furious when I explained to Yiayia that I didn’t
know any nice Greek boys, we were only one of two Greek families in Lexington at that time, as far as I could tell. In fact, as a freshman at RISD, I was friendly with my classmate George Stavrinos. Like me (and you) George was from Massachusetts. He was born in Somerville and although he was gay we discussed how, in a pinch, we might introduce each other to our parents as potential marriage partners, to keep hope alive.
George's drawings were astonishing. He arrived at RISD fully developed as an artist and, almost immediately after graduation, became a fashion illustrator for Barney's, providing beautiful pencil drawings of elegant models in Barney's fashions each week, for the Sunday New York Times.
I recently looked him up in Wikipedia, wondering why I've never found recent work by him. He died in 1990; was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2007.
Not Mentioning Zorba
Like the bouzouki, specifically the music from "Never On Sunday," that scamp Zorba has become a cliché and thanks so much, Olympia, for not mentioning him, Nikos Kazantzakis, Anthony Quinn or the movie "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," in your memoir.
Each year when my uncle Ted carved the Thanksgiving turkey, he would make his too familiar joke about carving the
Turk. Somehow, my mother and all her bleeding-heart liberal Democrat siblings were deeply negative about Turks. I belatedly realized, Ted expressed his support for the Serb cause during the genocide in Croatia, that Turk could be a word that includes the meanings Arab or Muslim.
Thank you, Olympia, for omitting derrogatory comments about Turks from your memoir. I wonder if you are not racist because your father's family came from Cyprus, where Greeks and Turks share one nation?
My dream is a wedding movie about Greeks that would match the heights, depths, multi-class and multi-ethnic vision of "Monsoon Wedding" ... At the same time, I admit that my family members did share "Big, Fat"-esque opinions such as: “Oreo, from the Greek,
oh-ray-oh, the nice cookie.” And, “O.K.! From the Greek: “
Ollah-kalla! All is well!”
[To be continued.]
