by Gail M Feldman

Created on: October 04, 2010

Onions (and Garlic)

Don't hate me; I got my little sister stoned. She wasn't that little, and she didn't actually get stoned. I was home from college and some friends and I offered her a joint. Nothing happened. She felt obligated, though, to act stoned (she later admitted) so she blurted out "I feel like an onion." Those of us who were actually stoned may or may not have found that "deep."

Maybe she'd been listening to the Beatles' "Glass Onion" from their White Album, which had come out a few years earlier, on the sixth anniversary of JFK's death. We still listened to that. I still do.

I didn't find out until less than three years before her death that my mother didn't like to eat onions. (She had never, to my recollection, served them to us; I had never thought about it.) She liked their flavor; she would cook with them, then discard them. What a waste, I thought. During that educational visit I made her hand them over to me instead, and I gobbled them greedily. You could not have gotten me to exchange them for chocolates. (Well, not milk chocolates, anyway.)

Many film buffs discovered the (huge) talents of actor James Woods by virtue of his performance in The Onion Field. Not I; I discovered the film (and the Joseph Wambaugh book from which the film had been adapted, by virtue of having seen Woods in Holocaust, also where I first saw Meryl Streep, come to think of it.

When Holocaust was first aired, I was pretty excited. At the time, I worked for the Social Security Administration (an organization that fo 13 years declined to give me the time of day) in downtown Los Angeles, in a room where eight of us occupied desks in two rows facing each other from opposing walls. I came to work in high spirits the day after the first episode, asking everyone if they'd seen the show. No one had. And furthermore, added one colleague, she never would. She didn't approve of such shows. They caused ill feeling among people of different races or beliefs. She hadn't watched Roots (nor, I presume, read the Alex Haley book Roots: The Saga of an American Family upon which the miniseries was based) when it was aired the previous year, and she wasn't going to watch this either. "Why," she proposed, "what if after watching it, as a result, a little Nazi child went to school and got picked on by a little Jewish child?"

Yes, I was flabbergasted, too.

Anyway, my recollection of how things were during Roots' airing was that it promoted communication and caused not one whit of bad feeling

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