I was at my parent’s house looking for a book and came upon a surgical plan for facial plastic surgery for my mother. I’m not sure if she ever went through with it — they did a damn good job because I can’t tell. But I feel sad for her (I think she is beautiful naturally), angry (this is something that she should have at least run by her kids), and ashamed (I think cosmetic surgery is superficial). Should I just suck it up and not say anything? Or do I ask her about it?
Sincerely,
Aghast
Dear A,
What we think we know of our parents is generally the tip of an iceberg. This is a scary/nauseating realization: that we may not even know our own guardians. In this situation, the plastic surgery is first and foremost, your mother’s business. It is her face, her youth complex, her body afterall. I don’t know that she has any obligation to run the prospect of realigning her face by her children.
Ideally, yes, it would be nice to be informed if someone we love takes a knife to their affect. I used to cry hysterically when my father just shaved his beard: the shift in a face I knew terrified me. Your sadness is totally understandable. But remember, plastic surgery can mean a million things. It can indicate self-hatred, yes, but it can also be done for complex health reasons. Example: I know a woman whose eyes were drooping with age. Eventually her own eyelids were blocking her vision, so she had her eyes done. Click here for more on reasons for plastic surgery.
A pamphlet, is also, just a pamphlet. If you feel so close to your mother that you think she should share this information with you, why not approach her about it? “Mom, I found this. Is it yours?” But approach, if possible, without judgment or desire to change your mother. Ask her about her motives, try to understand where she is coming from before attempting to change or shun her decision. Some of her adult issues are hers and cannot be changed and altered.
The best you can do is say “I love you! I think you are gorgeous just as you are!” Maybe she will hear you, maybe not. Ultimately, your blanket view of plastic surgery as superficial will prevent you from hearing, seeing, or understanding your mom’s motives. Even though you like her the way she is, she might not like her, which can be an intense thing to learn about your parent. Work to just listen to her.
Just like you want to be seen as an autonomous adult without a judgmental eye, so do your parents. You never know what kind of skeletons people have in their closets, so be gentle as you approach her not as a baby, but as a mommy with a real history.
Maybe ask how she would feel if you wanted to do the same, it might, at the very least, push her to probe her moral assessment of the surgery. Show the video of Heidi Montag’s mother’s reaction to her daughter’s facial rearrangement for fodder.
” title=”www.send-email.org”>www.send-email.org to merissag[at]gmail[dot]com.
What do Robin Williams, Adam Sandler, James Caan, Martin Sheen, Adam Lambert, Sammy Davis, Jr., Al Gore, Jerry Lewis and Bob Saget have in common – besides show business? Each has appeared on the Chabad “To Life!” Telethon, which will celebrate its 30th anniversary show on Aug. 29, from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. on KTLA, with no less than CNN’s Larry King as host. King will preside along with telethon founder Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin of West Coast Chabad—plus multiple celebrities and dancing rabbis who will grace the set as usual. Tune in to see King interview stars like Sheen about why they’ve supported Chabad, as well as telethon highlights from the past three decades. Here are some of the top 10 celebrity moments – in no particular order – as related by telethon producer Chaim Marcus:
– Adam Sandler spoke in 2004 wearing a Chabad telethon cap, glasses, a well-worn T-shirt and lots of beard stubble: “I know my mom’s watching right now, and she’s probably saying, ‘Adam, did you have to wear that shirt?’ Mom, I didn’t shave – I know you’re wondering about that. But look at the [very long-bearded] rabbis!’” Sandler also deadpanned to Cunin et al: “I watched the telethon last year and you’re dancing even better this year.”
– NBA champion Jordan Farmar shot free-throws to raise money – at $1,800 a shot – in 2008, managing to land 37 baskets in 90 seconds despite the frenetic klezmer music playing in the background and rabbis shouting things like, “What a beautiful mitzvah this is!” and “Plenty of gifts, my man!” Not to mention actor Tom Arnold running around and joking that his Chabad telethon cap was great for hiding his hair transplant plugs. When asked how many shots he could make in one-and-a-half minutes, Farmar replied: “Man, however many it takes to save the world.” Rabbi Chaim Cunin, the telethon’s executive producer, later told the Journal: “[Farmar] raised $66,600 in 90 seconds. How many people can say that? He made 37 free throws in 90 seconds. That is a lot of mitzvahs, as we say.”
Story continues after the jump.
– “It’s good to be here at the annual Saint Patrick’s Day Telethon!” Carroll O’Connor joked on the first Chabad telethon, which aired on Sept. 8, 1980. So how did the non-Jewish actor get involved with the organization? After the Chabad House in Westwood burned down in 1980, O’Connor chanced to drive by the gutted facility. “He met with Rabbi Cunin and discovered the work that Chabad was doing,” Marcus said. “Initially Rabbi Cunin had no idea who he was, because [like most Chasidim] he does not own a TV set. But Mr. O’Connor said, “I’m an actor, I work in television, maybe we could do something together to raise money?” Thus the Chabad Telethon was born, which went on to raise some $150 million over 30 years, Marcus said.
Story continues after the jump.
– “You’ve got to believe in Sha-bad,” Bob Hope said on a video in 1991, mispronouncing the name of the organization as many celebs – Jewish and non-Jewish—have done over the years. “No matter how many times we tell him – Chabad, he can’t get it,” then-host Jan Murray quipped of Hope. This year’s telethon will feature a video of all the stars who have botched the name, including Jack Klugman and even Larry King himself, who Shabad-ed it while rehearsing last year’s show. “I said, ‘Larry, it’s chhhh,—you know, like Chhhaim, Chhhannukah, chhhutzpah, chhhhallah,’” Marcus recalled. “Larry said, ‘OK, I got it’—and then he Sha-baded it again. I said, “Larry, it’s Chhhabad!” And he looked at me and said, “I know how to pronounce Chabad! I have a daughter named Chaya!”
– In the mid-1990s, legendary rocker Bob Dylan and his Chasidic son-in-law, musician Peter Himmelman, belted out “Hava Nagila” along with actor Harry Dean Stanton, who recently portrayed a crazed polygamous cult leader troubling Bill Paxton and his secretly polygamous Mormon brood on HBO’s “Big Love.” All three sang, with Stanton and Himmelman playing guitar. Chabad rabbis had helped Dylan return to Judaism after the musician embraced Christianity for a time. Dylan, in turn, embraced Rabbi Cunin on the show.
– Sammy Cahn, the Oscar-winning lyricist, songwriter and musician who made hit recordings with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Doris Day, riffed on his ditty, “High Hopes” in 1984, which he rewrote as “Chai Hopes:” “We had a fire you know/That’s why we’re making this show/We need your dough/We’ve got Chai hopes,” Cahn sang. The lyricist originally wrote the song with Jimmy Van Heusen for Sinatra in the late 1950s.
Martin Sheen and Rabbi Cunin on the First Telethon, September 8th 1980
– Old Blue Eyes himself phoned in a pledge to the telethon, as did the late, great actor Marlon Brando – The Godfather and Stanley Kowalski to cinefiles – who called in at least five times over the years. Other caller-inners have included Barbra Streisand, John Denver, Van Halen’s David Lee Roth and comedian Richard Lewis.
– “Sam-ela, Sam-ela,” Jan Murray would say when Rat Packer Sammy Davis, Jr. (a convert to Judaism) visited the show. “I’ll tell you the emes,” Davis, in turn, would say when lauding Chabad. In addition to performing his iconic “The Candy Man,” peppered with Yiddishisms, on the telethon, he once personally handed Cunin a hefty check on the show.
– Actor John Voight – – who made his first telethon appearance in 1986 – has told the tale of how a non-Jewish actor like himself became enamored of Chabad. “Jon was meeting with Rabbi Cunin in his office when a family came to the door and said they had no food or furniture, and that they especially needed a couch,” Marcus said. “‘Jon, can you stand up?’ Rabbi Cunin asked. Whereupon the men carried the couch downstairs, and Voight put the couch in his own pickup truck, to deliver to the family’s home. From that moment on, Jon said, ‘This [Rabbi Cunin] is my kind of guy.’ He’s adopted Chabad and vice-versa.”
– Writer-director Tom Kramer (“Fridays,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm”) ran to the telethon set immediately after his own wedding in 1995, still wearing his tuxedo, with his bride (in her white gown) in tow. “Tom Kramer had had a meteoric rise to fame in the 1980s, but by 2002 he was homeless, on drugs and his life was in shambles,” Marcus said. “Someone told him about Chabad’s drug rehabilitation program, and he went into the program and got clean. Three years later, he told his story on the telethon, on the night of his wedding. One of the writers from “Curb Your Enthusiasm” happened to be watching the show, realized Tom was back, and invited him to direct an episode.”
You can also watch the telethon live online by visiting tolife.com
On August 16th, I boarded a plane along with 24 other cast members of Beit T’Shuvah’s original musical Freedom Song, heading to Minneapolis for a single performance. I have been the Freedom Song Coordinator for the past 2 years and have helped plan performances all over the country. I have also been a cast member and played several different roles in the play. This twin city tour was very meaningful to me because it was the last one that I was responsible for coordinating. I have decided that it is time for me to move on from Beit T’Shuvah and to try something new, and this will be my last week there.
Freedom Song has two separate storylines playing out simultaneously that do not interact directly, yet are deeply connected by their parallel themes. On one side of the stage, the viewers see a family celebrating Passover, and on the other side, the actors stage a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. The way that these two stories are related is the correlation between the exodus from slavery in Egypt and the exodus from the slavery of the addictions that oppress people who are addicts and alcoholics. The cast is composed of current residents and alumni of Beit T’Shuvah. As new residents and members of the community take on different roles, the script changes, as people are encouraged to incorporate parts of their own stories.
This last show, I was the most honest that I have ever been with an audience about what my core issue that led me to be in recovery is. It was one of the bravest moments of my life. On the side of the stage where the family is celebrating Passover, the actors begin talking about the four questions. The focus then comes back to the side of the stage where the people in recovery are to speak. I stand up, and say, “I have a question… How am I supposed to spend the rest of my life being truthful and showing people the real me? I act like a chameleon, constantly changing who I am because I’m so afraid that people will stop loving me because I’m gay. In the end I feel lost, unbearably empty, and all alone… just me and my different masks.” I was able to stand up with pride and speak this line in front of 800 people in the audience of the Sabes JCC. What struck me was how I had been so fearful of being open, yet the words flowed smoothly and profoundly. My lines came naturally because I have come to understand and respect my own my struggles. When I first became part of the cast of Freedom Song, I was having a really hard time remembering the lines that I had written based on my own story. Rabbi Mark Borovitz said that it was because I hadn’t really faced this core issue, and he was right. That last performance, my lines flowed absolutely smoothly because I have done tremendous amounts of work to get to know myself and work everyday to be the best person I can be. That evening in Minneapolis brought me one step closer to freedom because I allowed myself to be vulnerable and allowed myself to be seen.
” title=”Amazing photographer” target=”_blank”>Laurel Johnson Photography
Israel and the United States reportedly are attempting to prevent missile sales to Lebanon and Syria.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with Vladimir Putin, his Russian counterpart, in a bid to persuade him not to sell P-800 Yakhont supersonic cruise missiles to Syria, Ha’aretz reported on Friday, and Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak is set to make the same case in Moscow this week. Israel’s case is that Hezbollah used Chinese-manufactured missiles purchased by Syria to target Israeli ships during the 2006 Lebanon war.
Meanwhile, Israel and the United States want to keep France from selling the Lebanese military HOT anti-tank missiles, Asharq al-Awsat, a Saudi-owned, London-based newspaper reported.
In a Paris-datelined story, the paper quoted French officials as saying that they had rebuffed such pressure, and that the delay in the delivery of the missiles was caused by the confusion arising out of Lebanon’s current political crisis, arising from tensions over Hezbollah’s role.
Western powers want to prop up the Lebanese military as a means of containing the influence of Hezbollah, a terrorist group, but Israel’s wariness of Hezbollah influence into the military intensified after a Lebanese officer shot over the border and killed an Israeli officer on Aug. 9.
The United Nations and the United States determined that the Israelis under fire were on the Israeli side of the border, trimming a tree that could serve as cover for an attack.
A Lebanese newspaper, al Liwa, reported Friday that U.S. officials warned Lebanon that Israel would destroy Lebanon’s military within four hours should another such incident occur.
” target=”_blank”>Governor David Paterson may be indicted for his role in attending a Yankees game.
Really, Yankees, really? You gotta pile on the most inept governor New York’s had outside of a musical? What’s next, spending $424 million on free agents and then going out and winning the world series? Oh, right, that was The Yankees Read More »
The LA Times ran a ” title=”website” target=”_blank”>website and reads the assessment of the California application, it becomes transparently clear that the dysfunction in our state, where teachers’ unions can virtually veto any reform effort, was obvious to the government’s reviewers. Despite the state’s education leaders’ best efforts to convince the feds that needed reforms had been implemented and the “reform agenda was comprehensive and coherent.” The glaring refusal of two thirds of the state’s teachers’ union leaders to sign on to the Memorandum of Understanding regarding reform was too much for the feds to ignore.
Indeed, as a reviewer wrote,
the state’s inability to garner support for the reform agenda from less than 20% of the LEA’s and only union support in 33% of the participating districts may signal programmatic or collaboration obstacles that may prevent the state from achieving its proposed reforms. The number of points awarded to this section is due to the concern that the number of participating LEAs and the limited number of union leaders that signed the MOU may indicate insufficient commitment to attain the designated reforms.
In the section of the grant proposal where the comments regarding the non-participation of the unions in reform efforts were cited,
California’s proposal received only 100 out of a possible 125 points
. That loss of 25 points (out of the total of 423 points for all the sections of the proposal) was more than the 17.8 points that stood between our 16th position with zero dollars and the tenth position held by Ohio which received its requested amount of $400 million.
Clearly, the collective decision of many of the state’s teachers’ unions to not participate in the
Race to the Top
proposal ended up costing the taxpayers of California 700 million dollars. Seemingly not a big deal to the unions’ bigwigs, one of whom described the $700 million earlier this year as, “peanuts.”
Next time UTLA’s A.J Duffy or California Federation of Teachers’ president Marty Hittelman protest the cuts in education funding emanating from Sacramento, let’s ask them to first find the missing $700 million of “peanuts,” maybe they’ll know where they are. And the next time they tell us how concerned they are about the education of our kids, we can ask them why they turned away $700 million because they didn’t like the reforms and accountability that might have inconvenienced them but would have changed countless lives of young Californians. Clearly, kids aren’t number one on their agenda.
I’ve written before about how the error rate in the practice of medicine is far greater than that in other industries. I’m not talking about when doctors make a difficult decision that in retrospect was wrong; I’m talking about just plain mistakes, such as when one medication is ordered but another is dispensed or when the dose dispensed is 10 times greater than what was what was intended because of an extra zero was written in the order. We are finally looking to fields such as aviation to learn how to adopt safe practices in every part of patient care.
And though our error rate is too high, even with best practices it will never be zero. Even in aviation some planes go through the regular maintenance, go through the take-off checklist, and still crash. In a diner, an error might lead to a ruined meal. In healthcare, and error can lead to a catastrophic injury. So what should doctors do after an error has already happened?
The standard paradigm for handling medical error management has been the legal defense. Doctors were advised not to communicate with the patient or the family for fear that they would disclose something that would increase their legal liability. Patients and family members felt cut off from information just when they felt most injured and vulnerable. Doctors felt unable to continue caring for the patient and to express remorse for what happened. Rather than concentrate on helping the family and the patient recover from the mistake, the focus was on preparing for the anticipated lawsuit.
Fortunately, the paradigm is shifting. More and more institutions are moving to a policy of complete and prompt error disclosure. Physicians are trained to sit with patients and families immediately after adverse events, explain what happened, tell them what is known so far, and explain that the institution will promptly investigate the details of the case to see if errors occurred. Importantly, physicians can express remorse. If errors are discovered by the internal investigation, the patient or family are informed of the error and offered compensation.
This open approach has met with some resistance due to the fear that it would lead to more frequent malpractice suits and awards. A study in the current issue of Annals of Internal Medicine suggests that the opposite may be the case. The study reviews malpractice claims against the University of Michigan Health System (UMHS) from 1995 to 2007. In 2001 UMHS implemented a program of full disclosure of medical errors with offers of compensation. The study shows that the rate of lawsuits, patient compensation and legal costs all declined after the change.
So transparency and honesty after errors is not just the most ethical policy. It’s the better business policy too. The hardest time to be honest is after something goes horribly wrong, but that’s when patients most count on our honesty. Many patients and families are ready to forgive if they see that we are doing everything possible to assure the error doesn’t happen again. We now no longer have a legal excuse for not knowing how to say we’re sorry.
Important legal mumbo jumbo: Anything you read on the web should be used to supplement, not replace, your doctor’s advice. Anything that I write is no exception. I’m a doctor, but I’m not your doctor despite the fact that you read or comment on my posts. Leaving a comment on a post is a wonderful way to enter into a discussion with other readers, but I will not respond to comments (just because of time constraints).
