This means that the person in mourning is Fred Astair to your Ginger.  And you need to follow their lead, hyper aware of every nuance of the encounter: listen closely to what the person is saying and try to discern where they want the conversation to go: are they pushing here, pulling there.  I cannot emphasize enough the need to mindful of the direction they are taking you, not the direction you want to take them.

I say this because two and a half years ago we learned that my husband had cancer and in October of 2009 he died.  And because he was well liked by many in our large circle of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, there was a tremendous outpouring of support and sympathy from the Michiana community.  But at times this outpouring became almost too much for us to bear, for every time we went to the grocery store for months afterwards, even as recently as last month, we would run into people who hadn’t seen us since he died and who were eager to express their sympathy.  This may sound cold, but we had been living with the illness and death for so long, and often we would run into two, three, four people we knew at the grocery store who would, of course, want to know how we were doing, and we just didn’t have the energy to keep condoling every time we went out.

We craved normality and a break from our sadness.  We just wanted to go to the grocery store and have it be a fun outing.  Instead, the face of almost everyone we ran into fell when they saw us.  I so appreciated the friends who followed my lead when I chirped that we were doing great and who didn’t press us with a second, more serious, “But how are you all doing.” The middle of the produce section was not the place that I want to perform my dance of grief, describing my insomnia (or worse, my children’s insomnia) or the crushing pain that feels as if it is reducing my bones and organs to the ashes that my husband’s body has become when the enormity of his absence does sometimes compute for me and I feel utterly bereft.

Going out in public became particularly difficult for my children.  To be reminded continually of their loss, to be asked constantly to condole and grieve, to have friends only be sad with them became extremely trying and they would often excuse themselves from these conversations.

We began complaining too much about this until we started reminding ourselves that this wouldn’t be happening if so many people did not truly care about us.  This became my mantra to myself and my children until one day I finally realized that these friends were also grieving Scott’s loss, that they missed him and were working through their grief as well, a grief they had in common with us.

So, what to do?  Be Ginger Rogers, beginning with my friend April’s advice: smile warmly and say “It’s good to see you,” or make some other positive acknowledgment of the person before you instead of the loss surrounding them.  Save the grief talk for a private moment. or, better yet, write a note to your friend.  My favorite notes, the ones I absolutely treasure, are those from people who described how evident Scott’s love was for me.

Sometime this past spring I read a letter in the newspaper from a woman who complained that no one in her community would talk to her about her husband’s death, not even when she would bring up the topic.  I was immediately struck by the very opposite experience this woman was having.  But then I realized that she had lost her husband twice, both in her home and in her community.  I have the solace of knowing that if I need to talk about Scott or my pain, there are so many of you out there ready and willing to dance that dance with me.  In high heels and backward.

Sure, hard economic conditions helped keep folks slender in the old days. In I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith’s beautiful 1948 novel about love and family life in tough times, the young hero, seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, comes to expect that a skimpy Depression-era bread-and-butter snack will stand in place of a proper evening meal, and even the hearty butter she knew growing up has been economized away in favor of pale, unsightly and unsatisfying margarine. At least the bread is still good traditional British bread. “I thank heaven,” she says, “there is no cheaper form of bread than bread.”

And yet of course we now know that there is. For there is no cultural expression, no fundamental human need, that cannot be cheapened; there is nothing so central to our life that somebody won’t try to get rich by hawking an adulterated version.  No cheaper form of bread than bread? Sure, there is. You know what aisle it’s in over at your local grocery store. Maybe a pale, insubstantial loaf of it rests on the counter now, not far from your radio and your coffee pot. There’s one at our house.

For in the years since the publication of Dodie Smith’s novel, we have come to accept and perhaps even enjoy emptier and emptier foods. We should be able to create better lives as easily as we slide into these more impoverished ones, but we don’t. Why is that? How did we debase something so central as bread, the very staff of life?

The writer Karl Kraus talked about “baking bread from bread crumbs,” and by that he meant a society gathering up its scraps and crumbs and second-rate goods and cynically assembling them into barely acceptable facsimiles of the real thing and selling them off. Just think of any mediocre situation comedy on television, recycling the same little stories and jokes until the viewers are left snoring on their couches, and you know what it means to bake bread from bread crumbs. Doesn’t that sound tasty?

But let’s not berate ourselves for having become a passive society that feeds itself badly. Instead, let’s look around at our resources. Right now, today, Michiana’s farmer’s markets are filling up with real tomatoes and sweet corn. We’ve got community gardeners all around the neighborhood, socializing and getting good exercise and eating well, and folks who buy a weekly share of organic produce from nearby farms. There are people growing vegetables in little patches even in their front yards. All the color that drained out of those old snapshots, all the taste and good taste that drained out of our lives, is still there for the harvesting.

Soon, in the distance, we spotted the motorcade moving at highway speeds into the center of Chartres. François Mitterand travelled in style, with six motorcycles in front, then three or four sharp black limousines, and another peppy squad of motorcycles right behind. On the cycles little flags flapped and lights flashed and the darkened windows of the cars masked the president’s location. My buddy opened his backpack and pulled out an immaculate white gym sock that sagged with the weight of something mysterious within. The motorcade was nearly upon us, and if you had asked me, I would have said we were alone on our stretch of sidewalk.

But before my acquaintance could slip his hand down into the white sock for the thing that was hiding there, from out of nowhere two sturdy men in street clothes appeared and muscled him by the arms while a third man grabbed the sock. I could see the lump more clearly now—something the size and shape of an apple, perhaps, or a hand grenade. The third secret service man reached into the sock and extracted a silvery-gray object. It was the fellow’s fancy little camera.

In those few seconds, the motorcade zipped by and disappeared down the road. The camera was back in the hands of my youth hostel buddy, too late to use, and by the time he turned to me and said “What was that?” the secret service men had vanished. In 1981, a year marred by terrorism, this was my glimpse into the workings of the world. But that night in the cathedral, I considered the little bomb that could have been lurking in the sock.  I thought, also, of two US Marines I had seen guarding the American embassy in Paris, each man as serious as the machine gun he held in his hands. There was a magical passage in the Berlioz music that night where four brass bands join the orchestra and the symphonic choir, each playing from different parts of the cathedral, different points of the compass, and all the layers of music weaving together in the air. The composer’s meditation on human frailty, the fine stonework soaring above us, the patient apprenticeship of all those musicians, the attentive hearts of the audience members, the heavy weapons and the will to use them, the secret service, the dead who bore witness beneath the cathedral floor, the kaleidoscopic glass that filtered sunlight each morning into the shapes that speak of God: No single one of these was enough to explain the thing I glimpsed that day or heard that evening. We were, all of us under the stone arches, all of us under the arc of moon and sun, we were all of us meaner and richer than any name I could have given.

I’ve been turning over in my brain the strange intimacy we feel between what we do and who we are, perhaps because we have a new 16-year-old in the house and a summer job has become a priority.  But also because some of my middle-aged peers have found themselves jobless in this terrible, unforgiving economy.  Books on this topic are blooming faster than daylilies, often with the Pollyanna perspective that job loss, while, sure, a blow to the ego, is often a chance to rediscover oneself.  Chief among these shiny, happy job-loss stories is Dominique Browning’s new book Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas and Found Happiness. Browning tumbled to unemployment from a lofty perch as editor in chief of Conde Nast’s House and Garden magazine, and she describes poignantly the way work creates “scaffolding” in our lives, without which many people crumble to emotional bits.  Browning’s meditation on unemployment is full of observational jewels about the funky eating habits of those who are suddenly home alone, and an argument for wearing pajamas 24-7. But her book is about a different reality than most of ours.  Her biggest dilemma is not finding another job; it’s whether or not to sell her second home. My unemployed friends are not so much delighting in their work-free freedom as lying awake all night, mentally sorting bank account numbers in a Sudoku that can only be solved by finding another job. Really soon.

Against this identity-laden angst of trying to find work in mid-life, it’s kind of refreshing to watch teenagers feel exactly the opposite as they try to find summer jobs.  The whole point of first paychecks, after all, is NOT to connect the work with who you are. Teenagers don’t imagine that knowing how to buzz up an Oreo Blizzard at Dairy Queen means that they are, at their core, a Blizzard-maker.  Those Blizzards are just a way to get gas money in order to drive up Lake Michigan for an afternoon of awesomeness that really DOES capture what they are … which is AWESOME!

Think of your first job, likely filled with fumbles and humiliations.  My first time babysitting, at age 10, I industriously diapered a toddler in a snowy cloth and secured it with an outsized pin topped with a faded yellow plastic duck head.  When the kid began plucking worriedly at her hip, I re-checked my handiwork discovered to my horror that I’d run the thick pin through a fold of her moist skin.  I hollered louder than she did, as with trembling fingers I undid her accidental piercing. 

Since then, to earn money, I have taught piano to grade-schoolers, one of whom nervously left a pee stain on my piano bench that is still visible 30 some years later.  I’ve slammed pots over leaping flames in restaurant kitchens, sliced my finger wide open in a sandwich shop, spent a summer crawling on all fours in the boiling New Jersey sun, injecting mold samples into patches of Kentucky bluegrass and fescues on an experimental turf farm … before finally finding a job in a classroom that finally felt like work I wanted to be identified with, instead of against.

So, when does this change?  Probably it’s when we cross that mystifying threshold of adulthood that jobs are somehow supposed to become careers.  Once others begin to depend on us, once we’re no longer identified with a high school or college … that’s when jobs take on the heft of who we are. But: must they?  This is no longer a Mad Men economy where most folks work the same job until they retire. Increasingly, the shifting tides and new currents in the job market mean that most of us will be called to work more than one job, in waves, just as when we were teenagers, and this could be a useful reminder that we are more than our paychecks.

This terrible economy is a heart-breaker, it’s true.  But our work, I hope, is not who we are, whether or not we’re collecting a paycheck right now.  On this cusp of summer, fat with promise, consider all you do that truly makes you who you are, from sharing garden plants with neighbors, to creating beautiful meals for friends and family, to fixing broken machinery or broken hearts, to soaking in the honeyed loveliness of the setting Midwestern sun … Who are you?  What, really, do you do?  What any of us do for money will never, I hope, be the right answer.

Date Night earned tepid reviews for its recycled plot of a date night gone bad in the Big City.  My interest here, though, is that two-thirds through the movie, I could see the plot twisting in a direction I have come to know too well—a shady club door opens to throbbing music, hazy lighting, leering men, women dancing in undies … yup; another a strip club scene. 

It has become almost obligatory for movies and even TV shows to work strip clubs and pole-dancing into stories that sure don’t need them for plot development.  Don’t worry – I’m not going to linger on these dens of iniquity; my question is why, now, these scenes have become a narrative norm. Why in so many CSI shows or spy flicks does the female investigator or detective have a pole dance up her sleeve? (Not easy when you’re only wearing fringe.) We sure don’t expect our male heroes to break into Chippendales dances in every other episode.

In Date Night, the strip club scene is supposed to be funny, but it’s not much fun, frankly, to see a smart feminist comic squeezed into a tacky stripper teddy.  My first thought was YUCK, and my second was: This is the perfect metaphor for our schizophrenic culture, as women have made enormous progress, and yet are still squeezed into sexist stereotypes.

Consider these facts: 10 years ago, the top job in the U.S. for women was “secretary.” Now, with more women than ever in college, the top job for women is: secretary – and Secretary of State doesn’t count.  A year out of college, women earn 80 percent of their male peers’ salaries.  Ten years later, they earn 69 percent. * Put these numbers next to strip club-influenced sexiness as a cultural expectation of women, and it’s clear we still have a problem.

This problem has a name, as I learned from communications professor Susan J. Douglas, whose sharp and entertaining new book captures this strange empowerment-and-backlash media moment in its title: Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work is Done.  When Professor Douglas spoke at Saint Mary’s College this year, she said something I’d missed—that, interestingly, the media over-represents powerful women in show after show; think about all the strong women – especially women of color – who dominate TV shows, as lieutenants and detectives on “Law and Order,” as head surgeons, and as judges in peoples’ courts.  If you just watched TV and skipped NPR, you’d think women ran the world – not true. (Try this test: skim the photos on Google news every day for a week and see who’s making news.  Men, men, men, mostly—until you scroll down to the “entertainment” section.) Susan Douglas argues that this fictitious over-selling of women’s empowerment in the media effectively gives culture permission to promulgate girls-gone-wild, strip-club sexism, because it seems that “feminism’s work has been done.” Her term, “enlightened sexism,” suggests that sexism now is done with winking irony, pretending that women are equal, thereby justifying the return of old-fashioned objectification.  It’s the Tina Fey problem.

A couple weeks ago, obsessed with these ideas, I spent eight very strange hours at the local mall with friends, staffing an information table on Equal Pay Day, the day that marks how far into this year women had to work to earn what men made last year.  This year it fell on April 20. We sat eagerly at our table, with flyers and statistics about the gender and race pay gap, trying to ignore the Zumba demonstrators gyrating to Latin music right next to us.  We got the brush-off about 50 times for every person who was willing to stop.  I understand; I, too, have been on a “mall mission,” not wanting to break my stride.  But in more than a few cases with mother-daughter duos, the daughters stopped to read the literature and the moms dragged them onward to Abercrombie.  Kids get unfairness.  I think adults sometimes have gotten too used to it.  I want girls to know that stripper poles don’t have to be part of their repertoire.  And for boys to know there are better places to put their money than someone’s garter. And for all of us to know that garter money, even if it’s made to look fun, will never equalize the pay gap.

[Statistics from Douglas, Susan J. Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work is Done. New York: Times Books, Henry Holt and Co. 2010. 3.]