C-VILLE Weekly

As long as I think about it, I can see a brighter future for myself.”

Those words are spoken by Sahar Adish, a 16-year-old student at Charlottesville High School, in the final cut of the still-untitled film she and three other students created through Light House, Charlottesville’s nonprofit media education program for teens. It is the story of her life, a story uncommon for most American youth.

In the first shot, Adish climbs the steps of UVA’s Rotunda while Dave Matthews’ “Stay or Leave” plays over the soundtrack. In close-ups, interspersed with photos of she and her family from her childhood in Afghanistan, she talks about what brought her to Charlottesville. She talks about the fear of living under the Taliban and the relative security of coming to a new country full of possibilities. And she talks about the fear of letting down the parents who sacrificed so much for her. Education, she says, is key to making sure that disappointment never happens.

Toward the end of the film, as Adish’s narration turns to her college preparation, there are shots of her walking down a hall, opening an S.A.T. review book.

The short film was produced for Listen Up!, a national youth media network funded by various high-profile foundations, including the MetLife Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Listen Up! selected Light House and 14 other youth media centers from around the world to be involved in a project called “Beyond Borders.” Each group was given $6,000 to make a film that in some way tackles the themes of fear and security, which, according to the Listen Up! website, www.listenup.org, “may be the most important questions of our time.” While the distribution plans for the films are not yet set, Listen Up! hopes ultimately to feature them in an online film festival and nationally on PBS.

The Light House piece, completed at the end of December, is about Adish and her desire to fulfill her parents’ dreams for her by going to college, specifically UVA—and her fear that she might fail. Nothing particularly dramatic about that, you might say. But it is Adish’s background that sets her story apart, and gives her goals a dimension missing from the hopes of most ambitious high school seniors.

Fear, violence, flight and hope

Adish was born in Kabul, Afghanistan. Her mother, Kamela, was a teacher, and her father, Muhammad Naeem, the head of the department of mining and resources. In 1996, the world of her family—and for most people in Kabul—was radically altered when the city fell to the Islamic Taliban militia, then at war with the Mujahedeen warriors who had fought the Soviet occupation.

The Taliban, which posited itself as a reformist force, are fiercely Islamist and imposed a fundamentalist regime based on their interpretation of the Koran. Amputations and executions were ordered for petty criminals, television was banned, and severe restrictions were passed on the activities of women, who were not allowed to leave home without being accompanied by a male relative. And schooling was completely forbidden.

Adish’s family had always placed a huge premium on education, and the new restrictions were anathema to them. In a quiet way, her mother, a teacher for 25 years, rebelled.

“My mom started to home-school me, and that’s how the neighbors sent their own kids to my house—because my mom was a teacher,” Adish recalls. “And so she started to teach all of us, and after awhile it was a small school.”

Eventually, however, the Taliban discovered the Adishes’ activities. They forced entry into the home, beat some of the students and took her father away to a makeshift jail, where he was imprisoned for several evenings.

“When they entered the house, the kids started shouting and I escaped from the room,” Adish remembers. “So they could not do anything.”

Adish is slight and almost impossibly cheerful, always with a huge smile. Kamela has a similar demeanor. With her daughter acting as a translator—both her parents are working hard to improve their English—Kamela sat perched on the edge of her couch in her small living room in their Downtown neighborhood on a recent winter morning with an attentive, encouraging look on her face as she explained why she continued to teach after the Taliban took power.

“She couldn’t tolerate seeing others not going to school and not having educational opportunities,” Adish says, after an exchange with her mother. “She always hoped her children would be educated, in order to help the community.”

As far as the Taliban’s violent entrance, “she expected it at some point,” Adish says on her mother’s behalf. Explaining further, she says, “When she stayed home, she felt dead, not being in the community and helping otherswhen she couldn’t teach, she felt isolated.”

Immediately following the imprisonment of their father, the Adish family realized it was time to leave. “It was very easy for them to do any kind of tortureto make an example for others,” Adish says, with a polite smile. And, taking only clothes and a few things, Adish, her brothers and her parents fled to the Pakistan city of Peshawar. She was 11 years old.

The family left Kabul at dawn, walking to the bus station. The bus itself was stopped at three or four checkpoints, with the Taliban coming on board to search the belongings of the passengers. The women were asked if they had a ‘Mahram’—the man who was to accompany them everywhere—and the men were checked for beards, which were also required.

“And those who did not have long beards were taken out of the bus andthe bus left with the rest of the passengers,” Adish says. “Sometimes it took us even two hours in some checkpoints depending upon the doubts that the Taliban had on some passengers.”

In Pakistan, Kamela found a job teaching at an Afghani school where Adish was enrolled, but the family’s pilgrimage was far from complete. The streets of Peshawar were filled with Taliban, and after staying in the city for a year, the family moved again, this time to Islamabad, where they lived for three years.

In 2002, after a process spanning two-and-a half years and several interviews, the Adish family was notified—just 15 days before its flight—that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had selected it to go to the United States.

Reunion in a new society

The family was not told why they were selected, nor did they know the state they would be traveling to until the morning of the flight. Nevertheless, according to Adish, their happiness at the news cannot easily be described.

“It was very exciting, it was very exciting because that’s what we wanted,” she says now. “We didn’t know the future in Afghanistan, we didn’t know when we were going to go back there, and the only thing we wanted was a better education. It was good news.”

If the transition to a new society, new customs and a relatively unfamiliar language was difficult, neither Adish nor her mother lets on. And as Adish points out, a life in flux was by then old hat to the family.

“It was very happywe made lots of friends in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, so our life was kind of in change, always in change. We had already adjusted to a changing life,” she says.

While coming to the United States was a dream realized, the family’s good luck was not over. Sahar’s older brother, Baktash, now 25, had left Kabul in 1993 on a scholarship to study English in India, and in the course of the unsettlement caused by the war in Afghanistan, and the family’s flight from the country, they had lost track of his whereabouts. But through an amazing coincidence, last year a friend of the family ran into him at a party in Canada, where he was working as an immigration resettlement counselor. Since the time Baktash, who still lives in Canada, had last seen his family, he had gotten married.

There have been adjustments to make—Adish’s father, for instance, a highly successful engineer in Afghanistan, now works at the Courtyard By Marriott Hotel while he perfects his English. But his daughter, well schooled in English, took to Charlottesville High School easily.

“That was the huge problem for other students who came to Charlottesville, and my father, struggling for English,” she says. “But the rest was better, the rest was fine for me. I took advanced classes and honor classes right away, and I didn’t have difficulties with English.”

Now Adish, who ultimately wants to be a doctor, hopes to matriculate to UVA. “[That] is somewhere I can see my future,” she says. “I think because it is a very good school and it has lots of international students and good teachers and educational systems. And I want to go to medical school, and that’s where I want to study. I don’t want to go out of the city because my family is here, I want to be close to them.”

Her other brothers are also thriving: Honishka, 19, is a student at Piedmont Virginia Community College, while Ali, 12, attends Buford Middle School. Together, they are making their parents’ hopes for them a reality.

“When I see my mom, she taught me at home in a very bad situation where she knew her life was in danger, and now I can see how much they tried hard for our future,” Adish says. “So we should do something better for them. And yeah, that is kind of hard for us to think about it. But as long as we go through and improve our lives, it’s a good victory for them also.”

Story to the screen

In the movie, Adish narrates her powerful story without embellishment. And the production, skillful and conservative, respects that and draws little unnecessary attention to itself. Difficult as it might seem to believe while watching it, however, it wasn’t always clear that the Listen Up! film should center on Adish.

When Shannon Worrell, creative director and co-founder of Light House, first received information about the project last August, she scheduled a brainstorming session with some hand-picked Light House veterans.

“I kind of picked a group of kids that I thought would be interested in the subject and that I thought had the skill and commitment to do it,” she says. Adish and 17-year-old Sanja Jovanovic, who is from the former Yugoslavia, for instance, had previously worked on films through a collaboration between Light House and the International Rescue Committee.

As outlined by Listen Up!, the students were to submit a proposal about a film that would feature the themes of fear and security. Sixteen-year-old Joe Babarsky, another member of the group, took the early lead. According to Worrell, he put the proposal together virtually unaided, outlining a film that would involve the stories of all four students.

As initially conceived, the film was to tackle their individual struggles to meet their parents’ high expectations and their fears that they would fall short in some way. But after Light House submitted some test footage, the group was informed that it needed to limit its focus to either Babarsky or Adish.

“When we sat them side by side, Sahar’s story of loss and aspirations clicked so well with all of us that there was really only one choice,” Babarsky says.

As Adish puts it, “my story was a little more dramatic.”

Yet her colleagues did not realize the full picture right away. Jovanovic says that Adish kept much of her background to herself until well after they settled on her story.

“We were doing shooting in front of the Rotunda, and all of a sudden Sahar started speaking this story that we’d never heard, and she said they had to leave Afghanistan for Pakistan after they took her father away,” Jovanovic says. “And we were like, ‘Why didn’t you tell us this before?’ and she said, ‘I thought it was political, I didn’t want to get into politics.’ And all of a sudden the story got another arc, and it was very interesting.”

As shooting continued throughout October and November, the footage began to mount up. At about the same time, Listen Up!, with ambitious hopes for the Beyond Borders project, began bearing down on the group about production values, Worrell says.

“Basically, they wanted it to be broadcast nationally on PBS, so they were showing the footage they were getting from the different media organizations” to PBS and their financial backers, she explains. “The production values weren’t high enough. They wanted perfect, very conventional, very conservative broadcast television production values, like you would see on ‘60 Minutes.’”

To that end Listen Up! sent PBS producer Donald Devet to help the students film the comprehensive interview seen in the final cut. Devet provided aid on a range of technical details, from the type of light reflectors to use to which colored background gels worked best.

All well and good—but the professional help ran contrary to the mission of Light House, Worrell says, which is to “provide enough production help to make the production passable” but not “focus as much on the technology as we do on the stories.”

By telling the students that the project was their story and their idea, Listen Up! was sending a bit of a “mixed message” by insisting upon—and enforcing—production values that were clearly beyond the reach of amateurs working on their own, Worrell says.

It was a contradiction the students also recognized—they even began referring to Listen Up! as “the studio.” Says Luke Tilghman, 17, the fourth member of the Light House group that worked on the picture: “The idea of what they wanted it to be and what we wanted it to be were two very different ideas.”

“You can’t make a film-school kid in one school semester or one three-week workshop,” Worrell says. “You can’t create a great cinematographer or a great film director, technically, in that amount of time. But what you can do is sort of impress upon them the power of telling their own story, and give them the tools and the encouragement to tell their own story.”

She adds, “In my opinion, the hand of the so-called mentor, or the so-called grown-up [in the Beyond Borders project] is greater than I am philosophically comfortable with.”

Listen Up! Network Coordinator Tina Wieboldt says she understood the conflict, but that the organization she represents has its own mission.

“It’s hard for us, because we are raising the bar. Listen Up! is an organization that wants to help youth producers raise the bar in production, so that they are getting the skills they need and they understand what it takes to make broadcast-quality work,” she says. “All our organizations are at different levels in that respect. Some are more experienced and don’t need as much guidance, but at the same time, all our organizations do need a lot of guidance.”

While Devet’s help may not have been totally welcome, all parties agree that the benefits of the collaboration with Listen Up! yielded far more positives than negatives. In addition to the technical support, the group was able to hear from and provide feedback to other teenagers involved in the Beyond Borders project through international conference calls.

“The ability to learn about the intensely varied issues of the other teams in our working group was amazing,” Babarsky says. “Looking side by side at the issues of teen transgendered [people] in New York to Ukrainians living near Chernobyl and kids in the U.K. affected by foot and mouth disease was an incomparable experience.”

However, the students feel above all it’s the friendships formed through the collaboration, and the chance to tell a powerful story, that makes the experience most worthwhile.

“We all thought that the experience was much more important than the product,” Tilghman says. “So we all felt really blessed to be able to work on it.”

“The four kidsare all totally different from each other,” Worrell says. “And they all have said at different times, ‘I never would have done anything with any of these people,’ and they were all friends in the end.

“In that way, it was to me like a utopian experience at Light House, because you always imagine a group of kids each having one different, unique, amazing thing to give. I think it was just a magical combination of kids.”

Roll credits

A film is a moment in time, but a life goes on. For Adish, one of her more immediate concerns is calculus, the only class in which she doesn’t get As. She has pulled her grade up to a B from a C, however.

Adish is incorporating her film work with her studies—she has submitted the Beyond Borders film as part of her application to UVA. She feels very strongly about the finished film, as it conveys a message that is one of her central beliefs. She says she would like for teenagers all over the world to see the film, and take from it the idea that education is important—not something to be taken for granted.

“I would tell them that I didn’t actually value education when I was a young kid,” she says. “But when I stayed at home, I felt the value of it. You don’t value something else unless you lose it. [Education] is the way they could actually help the world and improve the community.”

Q: Hey Ace, I hear that the free parking lot next to C&O was recently bought and will soon be turned into some big construction project? True?—Lots of luck

A: True, Lots. The parking lot on the corner of Water and Fifth streets has been purchased and is slated for development, meaning that the final free parking lot in the City is about to go bye-bye. You can start circling for those ever-more-precious parking spaces now.

The 40-odd-space car lot was snapped up about nine months ago by Bill Nitchmann, a developer whose other properties include the Albemarle Bank building just off the Downtown Mall and the Technology Center complex on Forest Street. He took over the property from Water Street LLC (which he now runs), which bought the land from the City a few years ago in the hopes of creating something more lucrative than the parking lot it has been since 1961, Nitchmann says.

Nitchmann is poised to succeed in that endeavor, as plans have already been drawn up for what will be Water Street Plaza, a five-storey complex packed with that multi-use goodness the City is so eager to bring into its borders (consider the controversial, quasi-stalled Preston Plaza project that Mayor Maurice Cox swears will happen). Nitchmann tells Ace that plans call for retail space on the bottom floor topped by a second floor parking garage that will have nearly as many spaces as the current lot it’s taking over. But sorry, motorists—these spaces will be reserved for the folks who will be living in the upper three floors.

Nitchmann says that the residential area will be divided into 800- to 900-square-foot one-bedroom apartments, 900- to 1,500-square-foot condominiums and four penthouse suites ranging from 2,000- to 3,000-square feet. The roof will also feature a gymnasium and landscaped garden area.

It all sounds very chi chi to Ace. But then, as Nitchmann points out, that’s what a lot of the Downtown Mall has become in the past 10 years. I mean, Ace can’t even count how many upscale loft apartments have popped up recently marketed to up-and-coming single executives. (Cough, cough—Yuppies—cough.) Nitchmann’s counting on courting that market with Water Street Plaza, plus another segment of the population.

“With the amenities that the Downtown Mall now offers—movie theaters, fine restaurants, the new art building—we think it’s perfect timing for people that are retiring and moving Downtown to be close to where all the action is,” he says. “We’re really targeting individuals that are tired of driving.”

And to do it, a free parking lot is going the way of the dodo. Oh, the irony.

Nitchmann says that he’s still very much in the preliminary stages of development (zoning variances are still needed from the City) and a start date—much less an end one—has yet to be set. So for now, enjoy the free spaces while you can.

The first great one-liner to be called into the Rant line was seven weeks after its launch last year. “The bald chick ad,” the caller complained, “When will it end?” Succinct, specific (a local hair salon had been regularly running the offending advertisement in C-VILLE) and funny, it was ranting distilled to stand-up comedy.

But by the next week, February 25, there was a new turn: ranting as esteem-building exercise. “I like the bald chick ad,” the caller said. “I think the woman is beautiful with or without hair and I think we should be more tolerant.” (And P.S., all the kids in the class should get valentines.)

“What the hell kind of rant starts ‘I like the bald chick?’” inveighed another fed-up soul one week later. And so a cycle established itself in the pages of this newspaper: bitch, soothe, bitch.

The Rant began running as a weekly feature of C-VILLE on January 7, 2003. It replaced a long-running feature, Explain the Phenomenon, which invited readers’ smart-ass captions to sometimes witty, often plain amateurish, photographs. The Rant would balance the privilege usually extended to those with a penchant for writing letters to the editor with a get-it-off-your-chest forum for the phone-centric. Only two rules would prevail: no rants to extend past one minute and no slander. Otherwise, we’d transcribe it all, um, you know, ver-uh-batim. Yes, thank you.

And what, after a year of living angrily, have we learned about Charlottesvillians from their rants?

In no particular order: Traffic irritates them, the Iraq War irritates them, cyclists irritate them, people irritate them, sometimes restaurants irritate them, and ranting irritates them. Did we mention that traffic irritates them?

If they’re boiling mad on issues like the State budget, the paucity of Hollywood roles for older women, out-patient hospital services, the lack of a decent shoe store Downtown, Haliburton’s government-sanctioned corruption, or the tepid performance of the UVA men’s basketball team, they’re not picking up the phone to say so. By the way, that number is 817-2749, extension 55.

 

At about the time the United States invaded Iraq, then-columnist Ted Rall earned a lot of minutes from callers particularly in response to one column we headlined “Don’t support the troops.”

“I’d just like to say Ted Rall is amazing and he should have his own newspaper,” said one.

“I’ve had enough of your Ted Rall exclusives,” was a response two weeks later. “It would be more appropriate to rename his column The Rant.”

The next week, March 25: “Yeah, once again Ted Rall has amazed me. He is amazing. Mr. Rall, if I ever meet you, guaranteed I will shake your hand.”

“A firm resounding BOO! for Ted Rall. BOO! Don’t support our troops? Monsieur Rall, I once agreed with you that the President shouldn’t attack Iraq, but thanks to you I have no choice but to gravitate over to the other side.”

Mind you, the war’s main protagonists were not left unscathed during this period: “George W. Bush is the moronic puppet of a plutocracy of homicidal megalomaniacs, and we the people are fools for thinking that we’re informed because we watch corporate-sponsored television and are so comfortable in our ‘non-negotiable’ American lifestyles that we’ll ignore or even support any atrocities so long as a vaguely plausible piece of B.S. is used to justify it.” Draw breath here.

And then there were those who were grateful—repeatedly grateful—just to have a platform: “Thank you. What makes me rant are people who think this world would be a better place if we go to war with Iraq, because it’s just not gonna happen. This world won’t be better. Thank you for listening to me.”

If only drivers could inspire such gratitude. Alas, they are among the most reviled of God’s creatures. Who can forget the girl in the yellow slicker? “I was the girl in the yellow slicker last Saturday in front of the 7-Eleven on Barracks Road trying to clear the drain for the lovely City residents, and bad karma I wish to everyone who splashed me full on. I can’t believe how ignorant some people are around here.”

The malfeasant wishes spread through the year like so much rancid margarine: “To the asshole who nearly plowed through my car last Sunday: 1) My light was green! 2) I hope your red Toyota truck hits the back of a ’79 Pinto and vaporizes instantly.”

And then there was this angry contribution: “This is for the jerk who blatantly cut me and my roommate off at the intersection of 29 and Rio, and then had the audacity to pull off and gesture for us to fight him after we honked: We’d just gotten back from the gym, asshole, and totally could have taken your South Carolina redneck butt.”

People, people, can’t we all just get along? Where’s everyone driving to so carelessly? And how many of you are out there with one hand on the wheel and the other holding a cell phone dialing The Rant to complain about other drivers?

People on bicycles inspired their fair share of venom, too, beginning in June with the saga of “the Earlysville Road cyclist”: “O.K., my rant is about the idiot cyclists who get on Earlysville Road during the morning or evening rush hours. For those of us who live in Earlysville, this road is also known as the Earlysville 500 or the Earlysville Death Trap. People speed all the timethey drink and drive, they’re reckless. Please cyclists, keep off the road—it’s too dangerous. The wannabes are all in their SUVs with their cell phones attached to their heads. They’re not paying attention to what they’re doing. The redneck faction, they couldn’t care less.”

And neither could the cyclist, as we learned in the weeks to follow: “I am the idiot cyclist of Earlysville Road, and I ride to work because I can. Should I perish at the wheel of a NASCAR commuter or a drunken redneck longneck chunker, I will regret that I have but one bike to give for my City.”

“I totally agree with the bike riders on Earlysville Road,” said one caller somewhat confusingly (we think he meant, he agrees about the bike riders). “I almost ran two bike riders over the other day trying to pass them, because yes, I agree I do not have all day to go 12 miles an hour. And I’m sorry, my car, I pay taxes for the road, and the bicyclers don’t. So they need to get off the road, or find a road that’s wider.”

Predictably, the discourse ended on a personal and sour note: “Yeah, thanks. This goes out to the idiot who thinks cyclists don’t pay taxes and aren’t entitled to use Earlysville Road. Car taxes don’t pay for roads, you dumbass, property and income taxes do. I’m a cyclist and I pay car tax, income tax—more than you, trust me—property tax, more than you, again. Move to the left when passing cyclists, and bite me. Thanks.”

Uh, yeah, you’re welcome. Have a nice day.

 

Transportation was a favorite topic all year (can‘t wait until you start calling in about the tie-ups once Target opens and the Meadowcreek Parkway is operational!), but entertainment—movies in particular—drove its share of the rants, too. “If another person comes up to me and gets in my face and tells me one more time that I, quote—just have to go see My Big Fat Greek Wedding, I’m going to have to shove a big, fat leg of lamb down their ignorant throat.”

“O.K., the move The Matrix 2 or Matrix Reloaded or whatever, well, your reviewer said, O.K., it was totally awesome or something like that, alright, everybody’s raving about it. That movie sucked ass. It was a total waste of time. O.K. that’s all.”

Matrix Revolutions was evidently beneath contempt, but not those who miss out on local music: “Where in the hell was everybody on July 18 when all these great bands were playing at Starr Hill? This past weekend I went to the Outback Lodge to see a couple of great bluegrass bands and there were like 13 people there. Where in the hell is everybody? Why aren’t we supporting our local musicians?”

Assuming it’s fair to classify The Rant itself as local entertainment, it too was subject to plenty of mouthing off and criticism. “Yeah, I also need to rant, um, against The Rant. You guys don’t need to print every ‘um’ and ‘ah’ that people say in their message. Come on, those aren’t even words.”

“I think people are getting a little too personal with rants. This town is small enough so a little goes a long way. I’d hate to see a negative, belittling mood permeate our City because of certain individuals’ moods.”

More back and forth: “I’d actually like to make a rant about people ranting in response to other people’s rants.” (That’s different!)

“You know The Rant just makes me want to rantall your big bold letters with angry words, ‘snobby ass, stupid, idiots, no-growthers, snapbags, get off your ass’—it makes me mad.”

Indeed, some just hate the whole idea of The Rant—and they called to rant about it! (And yet you hear that irony is dead) “O.K., my rant is that your paper doesn’t have a Rave page. ’Cause there’s lots of good things going on, so let’s start focusing on that stuff instead of the rant stuff.”

Yeah, and another thing. (Remember folks, it’s 817-2749, extension 55. Call today!)

 

There were other favorite topics, of course—McMansions, soccer moms, peach applesauce and restaurant service—but by far the most prevalent insight (if you can call it that) of 2003, and leading the way already in 2004, was that other people are stupid. Why can’t people be more like us, we all wondered, week after week?

“Everything is 10 times worse at K-Mart because people who shop there are just absolutely retarded”

“The ultimate in stupidity is people who leave their lawn sprinklers on in the pouring down rain.”

“To the permanently adolescent Neanderthal who honked at me”

“My rant is to the foolish people who wear headsets”

“How about those idiot drivers out there who don’t realize that right on red means to stop and look first?”

“Yeah, to all the idiots who voted for the President”

“This is for that crazy loser and his crazy loser friends”

“To the insane woman running along Earlysville Road with her dog”

“Hey, this is to the idiots at the express checkout in the grocery stores”

“Hi. This is for the inconsiderate idiots”

Surely, we reflect looking over the year in rants, there can’t be that many imbeciles out there. Maybe it’s just the same dope time and again. Maybe he’s everywhere!

That might be the answer: one roving dodo-brain. In fact, it’s probably he who’s behind our favorite rant of the year: “Am I waiting for a beep? Am I waiting for a beep?”

Q: Hey Ace, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but every ad in a magazine that I have ever seen always shows a time of 10 minutes after 10. Even with weird watches with separate hour and minute hands, they still show 10 after 10. Whassup?—Chris Chronos

A:While Ace isn’t entirely sure what you mean by “weird watches with separate hour and minute hands,” Chris—you are aware that digital clocks are kind of the new kids on the block, yes?—he does know of what you speak. Ace took a few magazines from C-VILLE Weekly’s spankin’ new newsstand (hey kids, come in and buy a few copies!) and flipped through them in an attempt to solve your timely question.

He hit the jackpot in his favorite magazine, Esquire. (Ace would like to point out, by the way, that he was fielding readers’ questions long before Esquire’s upstart Answer Fella ever typed his first Q & A.) In the first half of the mag Ace found four watch ads from the high rolling likes of Rolex, Louis Vuitton and Elini. Three out of four featured hands on the 10 and 2. We’ll get to the other one in a minute.

Ace wasn’t surprised. He’s actually been aware of this little nugget since his salad days as a college undergrad when his writing professor filled him in on the watch-ad secret. But to get some local authority he turned to the Clock Shop of Virginia, the folks with that big time piece on the corner of Second and Water streets.

“It just has to do with visual balance,” says Ann Salamini, partner/owner of the Clock Shop. “Lots of times clocks have winding holes that are on the lower half of the dial,” she says, and those darker winding holes give more visual “weight” to the bottom part of the watch or clock when photographed.

That pretty much goes in line with what Ace’s prof said, although his rationale was a little more esoteric. He said that having watch hands at the 10 and 2 make the watches look “happy.” Frankly, Ace never really bought this idea. But Salamini lends a little credence to the theory, saying, “It looks down to have the hands at 20 after, or at the 4 and 8. It’s more bland,” she says.

And while looking at that one ad that didn’t have the watch hands at 10 and 2—a Ritmo Mundo Gran Data Collection shot with the hands at 4 and 8—Ace has to say it left him feeling confused and down.

Happy watches, sad watches. Whodathunkit? Actually, it isn’t that surprising. Ace has a long history of feeling down after looking at time pieces, specifically his alarm clock at 7am. He’d sure feel a lot better if he didn’t have to get up until 10:10.

Dear Santa,

All I want for Xmas this year is a new bicycle, my very own pony and a stripper pole for the rec room. Thanks, Santa!

Luv,

Amber Anykid, U.S.A.

P.S. Strawberry Shortcake thongs make rad stocking stuffers!

Postal workers should not have been shocked this year to receive scores of Christmas wish lists just like little Amber’s. Why? Well, in case you haven’t tuned in to teen or tween media lately, stripping has gone mainstream. Teenagers of the new millennium have grown up watching college students give lap dances on MTV’s “The Real World”; they’ve listened to Christina Aguilera’s album Stripped; they’ve taken cardio strip class at the gym, perused the mall for thongs and flavored body glitter, played video games that feature strippers on their Xboxes and Gamecubes, and watched endless music videos for which strip clubs and the denizens thereof provide the mise en scène.

TV shows and movies from “Stripperella” to Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle regularly feature voluptuous heroines flashing the flesh. Indeed, a questionnaire for college-age participants in “The Real Cancun,” the 2003 “reality movie” depicting spring-break mayhem, posed the question: “What’s the wildest thing you’ve ever done?” Responses included: “Stripped at a bar,” “Gone on top of a bar and flashed” and “Stripped in a club.” Somebody ought to break it to these co-eds: Stripping isn’t so wild anymore—it’s kid’s stuff.

Of course, for many girls who buy it, stripper-inspired fare isn’t actually about disrobing in public or even having sex, but about cultivating what writer and sexpert Susie Bright calls “the essence of titillation,” a coy yet brazen, look-but-don’t-touch sexual persona. “This is very appealing to the young crowd, the virgins, the preorgasmic, who want to flaunt and test their sexuality without actually having to do the deed,” says Bright. Along with marketing executives promoting their goods, many adolescents embrace these products as a harmless and fun way to wield sexual power, defending their right to express themselves through “Porn Star” T-shirts and “Hot Buns” hot pants, and dismissing those who object as dour, repressed.

Still, critics like Jean Kilbourne, best known for her documentary series Killing Us Softly, about gender representation in advertising, warn that the trend is more constraining than liberating, invoking a “very narrow, clichéd version of what’s sexy as opposed to any kind of authentic sexuality.” It’s a debate whose terms are familiar, from the feminist sex wars of the 1980s to the rise of “girl power” in 1990s pop culture to the explosion of feminist cultural criticism that snubbed the old-school women’s movement for its perceived lack of an ironic sensibility. But the discussion has acquired a new dimension now that a mass-marketed ideal of female sexiness derived from stripper culture is being sold to an ever-younger set. The stripper-infused products aimed at young girls are a creepy synthesis of cute and tawdry—seemingly designed to appeal to a 12-year-old’s tastes while gently easing her into the adult arena.

 

The most ubiquitous stripper-inspired purchase a girl can make is a thong, a product with a heritage in exotic dancing—in 1939 New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia decreed that the city’s nude dancers cover their private parts for the World’s Fair. Thongs marketed directly to kids and teens often don’t resemble standard lingerie. They’re usually cotton, not silk or satin, they’ve got a colored elastic band, and they’re not overloaded with lace or frills. Design-wise, they tend toward the self-consciously cute, bearing the visage of a recognizable cartoon character, adorned with a saucy saying and/or cheekily girlish iconography—cherries, gingham checks, teddy bears. The thong’s ostensible purpose is to hide panty lines, but what ultimately drives the sale is the nice but naughty message its design implies—and sometimes not so subtly.

“Feeling lucky?” begs the Smarty thong by David & Goliath. It’s white with a green four-leaf clover stamped on the front, and available at teen-girl fashion emporium Delia’s. According to market research firm NPD Group, from August 2002 to July 2003 thong sales in the United States climbed to $610 million—up from the previous year’s $570 million. Time reported that last year girls between the ages of 13 and 17 spent $152 million on them. Thongs average about $6 apiece, and you pay more for a brand name. (A “Simpsons” thong goes for $8, a simple glitter one for half that.) It’s no wonder, then, that licensers are eager to dole out their characters’ likenesses for front-and-center crotch placement; in the age of branding, it’s all the better if your Hello Kitty thong matches your Hello Kitty lunch box.

Click the About Us/Investor Relations link on the home page for mall-based teenage chain store Hot Topic, which in fiscal year 2002 produced earnings of $34.6 million, and you’ll learn that, founded in 1989, “the Company believes teenagers throughout the U.S. have similar fashion preferences, largely as a result of the nationwide influence of MTV, music distribution, movies and television programs.” Under Intimate Apparel/Panties, recent purchase items included: a Dr. Seuss Cat in the Hat thong, a Cookie Monster bikini panty and a Hello Kitty Goth Girl thong. Borrowing from underwear for little kids, some of these products—retro Mighty Mouse lingerie by Nick and Nora, for one—no doubt appeal to the older consumer who’s consciously infantilizing herself to look sexy. But they also seem calculated to attract younger girls who might still harbor some genuine affection for cartoon cuddlies. The Muppet thong is the adolescent equivalent of a toddler’s pull-up: somewhere between Underoos and lingerie.

 

The film Thirteen depicts the hypersexualized teen-girl consumer marketplace as inextricably linked to its central character’s accelerated downward spiral. It’s naïve junior high schooler Tracy’s demand for a hipper new wardrobe that sets the plot in motion: Tracy first steals to shop at a risqué boutique and clashes with her mother over a puppy-dog thong emblazoned with the words “Wanna Bone?”

The film clearly resonated with many girls’ experiences. Emily and Caroline, 13-year-olds at a Los Angeles private school, use “sexy” to describe the eighth grade’s most popular girl, who buys her school uniform in diminutive kiddy sizes so as to reveal more skin. Emily says lots of girls at her theater camp wore thongs and that the kids in her class think thongs are cool, though she bristles: “Who would want to see a 13-year-old’s butt?” She and Caroline recently attended a bar mitzvah where a tattoo artist was hired to airbrush designs onto partygoers’ body parts. A popular request, the girls reveal, was Playboy’s bunny-head emblem, the allure of which leaves the two momentarily divided. “Kids want it because it’s a cute little bunny,” says Emily. Caroline begs to differ: “It’s Playboy, which makes them sexy or something.”

Either way, the Playboy bunny has hopped back into fashion, swishing its cottontail into the teen market. At Hot Topic you can buy bunny trucker hats, pajamas, blankets and pillows. Dr. Jay’s carries Playboy bunny rhinestone thongs and camis, sporty shorts and sexy briefs. If, for children of the 1970s and ’80s, the bunny’s image is tarnished by connotations of dirty centerfolds and exploitation, Playboy Enterprises is making sure that’s not the case for girls of the next millennium. The bunny’s getting an extreme makeover; the company’s amping up its playful, mildly risqué qualities and de-emphasizing its pornographic ones. Playboy Enterprises still produces X-rated fare, but it relegates it to its adult-only outfit, Spice. “It’s rather like Viacom having Nickelodeon [for children] and Showtime [for adults],” company CEO Christie Hefner told Business Week Online this past August. Playboy’s licensing department targets 18-25-year-olds; they say a crossover into a younger market is unintentional. Yet founder Hugh Hefner—when asked by the Washington Post about kids donning Playboy togs—proclaimed, “I don’t care if a baby holds up a Playboy bunny rattle.”

Retail sales for the Playboy brand’s licensed fashion and consumer products have been estimated at more than $350 million for 2003, and the company celebrated its fifty-year anniversary with a November retail launch of limited-edition specialty products. They are in cahoots with rapper P. Diddy’s clothing label, Sean John, which is producing bunny-adorned velour tracksuits. There is a Playboy skateboard, a Playboy snowboard and, from M.A.C. Cosmetics, “Playmate Pink” glitter cream and “Bunny Pink” lipstick with a “laser-embossed bunny on the tip.” According to the press release, M.A.C. Cosmetics—a company whose progressive advertising tactics have included using openly gay celebrities Elton John and Rupaul as spokesmodels—was inspired by the “sheer fabulousness of the original Playboy Bunnies.”

Revamped as cuddly and camp, the bunny is poised to enter the world of family-friendly entertainment with Hef’s “Superbunnies,” a cartoon series about Playboy playmates who fight the enemies of democracy. Playboy’s entertainment division, Alta Loma, is developing the series with Stan Lee’s POW! Entertainment, and the press announcement mentions they’re aiming for a mainstream audience, so the superbunnies won’t bare it all. Stan Lee, creator of Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, already has an animated series about strippers on the air. It’s the adult cartoon series “Stripperella”: Pamela Anderson lends her voice and image to the superhero Erotica Jones, “a stripper by night and superhero by later night,” whose power source resides in her enhanced breasts. On TNN’s website you can play Strip-pole-rella, the point of which is to avoid falling objects and pole grease and collect as many dollar bills as you can.

 

Few have surfed the stripper wave with more success than Joe Francis, whose brainchild, Girls Gone Wild, is a 4-year-old, $100 million entertainment empire solely based on amateur videotapes of college students flashing their breasts. On Amazon.com you can purchase (at about $17 a pop) DVD titles that include Girls Gone Wild Extreme, Black Girls Gone Wild: Funkin’ at Freaknik, and Girls Gone Wild Doggy Style, Francis’s creation with Calvin Broadus (a.k.a. rap star Snoop Doggy Dogg). Unless Francis goes to jail—charges of filming underage girls for a spring break tape are pending in Panama City, Florida—his next venture, Newsweek reports, is a chain of Hooters-style restaurants. Francis, who once compared girls’ flashing Mardi Gras-style for his videos to feminists burning bras, doesn’t hide the fact that he is taking advantage of the opportunity to offer titillation in the guise of liberation. The fact that there are so many willing participants can be attributed partially to the desire for a quick fix of fame and the culture of reality television that engenders that desire, and partially to Jell-O shots. But perhaps this is, to some degree, what 1990s pop culture wrought.

The spring breakers Joe Francis convinces to “go wild,” at least the ones of appropriate age, would have also been the target audience when, in 1996, the Spice Girls shimmied onto the pop landscape, singing about how girls should tell guys “what I want, what I really really want.” They pumped up their fans with “girl power,” a philosophy that ran as deep as “You’re a girl, therefore you’re powerful,” and that could be easily construed as “Look sexy like this and you will be powerful.”

On MTV there were more lessons to be learned about girls and power. The 1995 Aerosmith video for the song “Crazy” features actresses Liv Tyler and Alicia Silverstone playing high school students who break out of school one afternoon and hit the road. They fund their joy ride with a trip to a strip club, where Tyler performs a mocking pole dance and Silverstone, dressed in a man’s suit, watches gleefully from below. Thanks in part to the video’s homoerotic overtones, the striptease seemed rebellious, transformative and empowering, a paradigm replicated in many a girl-centric

 

coming-of-age flick in its wake, among them Coyote Ugly (2000), a movie about bartending table dancers (the film’s tagline: “Tonight, they’re calling the shots”).

This generation also grew up concurrently with hip hop, a genre whose videos have always pushed the envelope in terms of stripper content. Videos are limited in their storytelling capabilities, certainly, and popular early 1990s videos like WreckX’N’Effect’s “Rumpshaker” conceded to this limitation, opting for “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”-style locales and high-heeled bikini-clad babes, visual cues that would inform hip hop videos for the decade to come. Female rappers of the early 1990s adapted what Alondra Nelson, assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies at Yale, calls “masculinist models of rap virtuosity and power as a way to gain respect in hip hop.” But eventually, when hip hop “embraced the pimp archetype,” female rappers were forced to “fight back on the same terms, taking up hyper-feminine personas.” That means trading the showmanship that comes with skill for the kind of empowerment that comes with stripping. Today’s female hip hop stars, like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, are taking their fashion cues from the table-dancing backup dancers and extras who populate male hip hop stars’ videos.

Of course, Madonna’s influence on the stripper trend cannot be discounted. While college kids and professors populating cultural studies departments in the early 1990s were eager to endow her pornography-inspired videos and Sex book with layered ironic sensibilities, it’s possible that the irony wasn’t translating to those who were children at the time. For example, in the opening to the film Crossroads, starring Britney Spears, the character she plays, an uptight good girl on the eve of high school graduation, wears men’s underwear and writhes around on her bed to Madonna, who—we’re meant to understand—was the soundtrack of the character’s early youth. By Act II, Spears’ character is on the road both to Los Angeles and girl power, stopping in at a bar for a liberating and lucrative stint of karaoke and pole dancing.

 

The “Porn Star” tee is this generation’s answer to the “I’m With Stupid” shirt—the words were stamped on baby tees, tanks and camisoles and sold at malls across the country. When asked about the shirt, Michelle, 22, a recent graduate of Barnard College, is quick to renounce it as “so five years ago.” But she recalls that back in high school, its intention was obvious: to be a calling card, one that says insta-sex. This is helpful for a girl whose look doesn’t automatically conjure up sexiness. Wear a Porn Star shirt and, as Michelle says, “you’re telling people to see you as sexy, as feminine.” Talk to girls about stripper culture, and you notice an interesting phenomenon: Stripping equals sexy and sexy equals feminine. Coupled with the adolescent’s age-old desires to look good and be looked at, you’ve got an odd mix of feminine/sexy bravado.

As Susie Bright observes, a stripper’s costume says “Long for me, try to win me, throw money at me, but you will never really get very far,” a message that holds obvious appeal for the junior high school girl who “want[s] to be mirrored, told [she’s] beautiful and desirable and sought-after.” A girl can easily meet these competing needs with an outfit that features a body-hugging Porn Star shirt and a thong embossed with a padlock design (made by David and Goliath, available at Delia’s). These garments may be a far cry from the confining pinafores and protective bloomers of yesterday, but they introduce a new set of problems. Some, like Jean Kilbourne, argue that they promote a brand of sexuality that “has to do with attracting men, and has nothing to do with a girl being the agent of her own sexual desire.” If adolescent girls of the 1950s had only two options, virgin and whore, these clothes seem to blur the line between the two. It’s a strange day when Hot Topic’s “Pay up, sucker!” thong (the words, in bubble letters, encircle a dollar sign) seems a better option for girls than the padlock one, because it smacks less of sexual puritanism. What’s most ironic, Kilbourne argues, is that “this is happening in a culture that’s not allowing sex ed in class.”

Raising these issues with teens without alienating them is a tricky business. Says Michelle: “We all want to be the girl who’s comfortable going with her boyfriend to a strip club, who’s all ‘What up?’ with the stripper. You want to be the girl who isn’t fazed by going to Hooters. Boys like big boobs, big deal. No one wants to look repressed.” No doubt, that’s music to the makers of Girls Gone Wild, a moniker that itself seems to proclaim innocence, as in: “Hey, don’t blame me! I happened upon these girls, and, dang, they gone wild!” It’s a sure thing, in this climate, that lectures about the hazards of thongs will, if anything, make them more appealing. Look what happened at a Long Island high school when, last spring, teachers chaperoning a senior-class field trip to Florida confiscated string bikinis from students’ luggage. The girls argued that they’d been violated, and the community found itself polarized. The melee was even written up in The New York Times, which quoted a letter from Catherine Pearce, 18, sent to her local paper, the Suffolk Times: “I’m not such a naïve little girl that I’m unaware of my own body, my own sexuality…. What exactly was it that they were protecting me from?”

It’s a fair question—one that critics of stripper chic have to be prepared to answer in a way that meets girls where they are. Jean Kilbourne advocates educating teenagers in media literacy and fighting for progressive sex ed in schools. But there may be a more expedient way to deflate the trend. This past November Oprah Winfrey devoted an hour to “releasing your inner sexpot”; overworked moms got stripper makeovers complete with pole-dancing lessons and new lingerie. Moms Gone Wild? Now it’s really over.

 

Alison Pollet writes fiction for middle-grade readers. Her novel Nobody Was Here is forthcoming from Orchard Books/Scholastic.

Page Hurwitz is a stand-up comedian and screenwriter.

 

Thong-a-thon
Teenagers scour local stores in search of sexy undies

Victoria’s Secret isn’t your typical teen haunt, but on a recent Saturday afternoon, the lingerie emporium at Charlottesville’s Fashion Square Mall was teeming with carefully made-up teenage girls. The store was in the midst of its semi-annual sale, and the girls were elbow-to-elbow with 20-, 30- and 40something women, expertly rifling through mountains of lime green, hot pink and animal print thongs piled on circular tables bearing signs that read “5 for $20.”

According to Darice, a UVA student who stepped into her first thong five years ago at age 14, the barely-there undergarments take some getting used to, but she couldn’t imagine going back to wearing plain old bikinis again. Three words, she says: “ugly undie lines.”

Today’s trousers are tight, low and risqué, and briefs simply don’t cut it, she adds. When asked about the cut of thongs, Darice says “thin is best.”

“Thinner thongs are more comfortable and more sanitary,” explains Courtney, another long-time thong wearer and fan of “Vicky S” (her nickname for Victoria’s Secret). Both girls say that their younger sisters and relatives wouldn’t consider wearing anything but a thong. For the ’tween set, though, it’s more about showing off to friends and saying “look what I got” than about visible panty lines. “It seems like they’re growing up a lot faster than we did,” observes Darice with a grimace.

Wander down the mall’s corridor to Gadzooks, a more obvious stop for young female shoppers, and you’ll find several racks dangling dozens of much racier thongs. Beads decorate top-rear strings and spell out “flirt,” “kiss” and “XOXO.” Iridescent satin pink and blue numbers hang near leopard prints and stripes. There’s plenty of black and white lace and fishnet, with bows, buckles and rhinestones as added accents.

“A lot of teenagers come in here to buy thongs,” confirms a saleswoman who asked to remain anonymous. “Girls love them, especially when they can see a bit of lace or sparkle popping out over the top of their low-cut jeans.”

You have to hike to the rear of Abercrombie & Fitch to find the store’s underwear collection, but once there, you can’t miss three silver buckets overflowing with everything from pale pink and blue thongs to those emblazoned with red polka dots. Most have been marked down to $3.90 from $9.50 and $8.50. One teenage girl giggles as she shows her friend a pair with “gifted” written on it.

Across the way at American Eagle Outfitters, the thongs are scattered on a table located front and center. It seems to have been a good season lingerie-wise for the store, because on this day, there are only three remaining pairs of blue and pink thongs decorated with horses, horseshoes and dollar signs. On a lower shelf, a few white and yellow cotton and lace thongs remain.

At Wet Seal, you’ll pass racks of itty-bitty tube, halter, crop and tank tops, as well as some mini skirts, Playboy bunny T-shirts and teenagers talking on cell phones before you hit the lingerie section. Here, you’ll discover a plethora of thongs, some with lace and bows, others with zodiac signs and still more Playboy bunnies. There is also a selection of more discreet red, blue and pink thongs.

But if the young shoppers at Fashion Square Mall on this day are any indication, discreet is not topmost on their minds when they’re hunting for underwear. When asked why she prefers Wet Seal’s thongs to the white cotton briefs for sale at the Gap, one 15-year-old’s answer is simple: “All my friends are wearing them, so why wouldn’t I?”—Susan Sorensen