UnderWoman Goes "Om"

In the aftermath of a free NY Philharmonics concert and fireworks in Central Park, the crowds have cleared.

What remains is mostly empty wine and water bottles, abandoned picnic baskets and blankets, maintenance and security crews.

And, underneath a grove of trees, seemingly besotted and without bearings, unable to see or speak clearly, stumbling when she tries to stand…one woman.

And, making his way towards her, weighed down with scavenged bits of ham, brie and bread, opened cans of beer, old newspapers, a seemingly homeless man….

He rifles through her purse -- camera, cell phone, cash, credit cards -- as she is trying to talk…either with a severe speech impediment or in a language he can’t understand.

Finally, she musters enough strength to stomp on his foot, elbow him in the chest, grab her wallet out of his hands and flash her !MEDICAL ALERT CARD! like it was some badge of courage.

“I have myasthenia gravis,” it says in bold letters, red and black, ”a disease that can make me so weak that I may have difficulty standing or speaking….Sometimes these symptoms are mistaken for intoxication. If I appear to need help, please contact my physician or hospital immediately.”

Now the man is conflicted, hovering somewhere between criminal intent and genuine caring.

He pauses, picks up a plastic-covered, polyester-lined tablecloth from the rain-soaked ground and puts it around her shoulders; offers food and drink, thinks for a minute, seems confused about the calling the contacts on her card, sits on the ground and begins to cry.

She sits next to him and cries also.

Some time goes by.

Then, the man seems to take heart, has hatched a plan:

“How many fingers am I holding up?” he asks, making the sign that doubles for “peace” and “victory.”

She also holds up two, and he seems pleased.

He touches his index finger to his nose.

She does the same.

Next, he begins reciting poetry:

“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a….”

She fills in the next word, barely audible, “patient…”

He continues:

“Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats....”

Then, he spies a police officer out of the corner of his eye and flags him down.

The NYPD officer in his Interceptor II is immediately on the scene...was, in fact, already on his way there…..

“What have we here?” he asks. “A drunk and a derelict? Or is there another way you want to explain it?”

The woman gestures to herself -- “Endy Ubit” -- hands the police officer her medical card, points to somewhere just beyond the perimeter of park, and says, incoherently, emphatically, drooling slightly, “Om.”

The officer looks perplexed, and motions to the man: “And you, Tarzan…under arrest?”

Endy shakes her head “No. Ero!”

“Zero?” The officer is trying hard to understand. Endy fishes in her purse for pen and paper, and holds up this sign: “Hero.”

The man formerly suspected of stealing her purse seems surprised, but tries the word on for size: “Hero… Yes, I suppose so!”

“And that makes me…..?” asks the officer.

She holds up the sign again:

“Hero.”

They fall silent, stand in a circle.

Blare and flash of sirens approach.

“An ambulance?” asks the man.

“And a squad car,” says the officer.

“Om only?!” pleads Endy, who both men are almost starting to understand.

Medics assess Endy’s condition while the man undergoes a background check.

After some gallows humor and a little laughter, the cars leave, sirens off.

“Om only,” says the officer.

With Endy propped up in the middle, both men see her safely home.

At the doorstep:

“Om now,” offers Endy.

“You saw the "ero" in us,” says the gentleman.

“There’s got to be a name for that,” says the officer.

In fact, there is!

“UnderWoman,” says Endy, bowing her head respectfully, ducking inside.

It is a name she had bestowed upon herself only recently -- in tribute to her relatively new "disability;" in honor of her lifelong ability to see and bring out the best in self and others; and in celebration of her talent for making fun, even if only of herself, in the face of it all….

It is the first time she has uttered the name aloud.

The Underpinnings of UnderWoman

Myasthenia gravis aside, mispronouncing her own name was nothing new to UnderWoman.

The first words she can remember saying were “Wendy Do-It!”

And it stuck!

It stuck for her parents, Archer and Merrie. For her brothers, Scoot and Grog.

All of them, and those that would be added to their entourage over time, benefitted from a kind of exuberant individualism that belied what others on the block (the DuMores and BoyCotts, for example…) might see as obstacles.

So it goes for brand builder Wendy Dubit in the aftermath of a short but sudden flare....

After consulting with her doctors, while undergoing a round of in-home intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG), she spends a few days under covers…and finds the time, the place, the climate delicious.

Into her boat-like bed she brings favorite books and poems – St. Exupery’s “Little Prince,” (in French and English), all things Seuss, T.S. Eliot, Hafiz and more. She brings pens and pencils of every color, sketch pads, writing pads.

She plays music, which has become the best medicine. She occasionally atomizes the room with fragrances of lilac, linden, orange blossom, night-blooming jasmine. She eats carrot-ginger soup with hearty bread, sips orange juice and seltzer zested with lemon, lime, kumquat and elixirs of elderflower and gentian.

She is refreshing her memory, savoring the present, envisioning the future.

Her moss-green satin comforter would make a great cape....

UnderWoman, a.k.a. Wendy Do-It, is underway!

UnderWoman: Up From Storage

Recently, Scoot Do-It had urged sister Wendy to “CLEAR OUT (at least a little of Mom’s storage unit)…I mean, c’mon!”

In fact, Wendy had never been in Merrie Do-It’s storage unit -- a capacious subterranean cage spanning almost a square block of apartment complex and containing most of the contents of their former house.

Wendy knows she is not equipped -- perhaps even genetically -- to do the job.

Over bottles of wine, as fair warning, she recounts Merrie’s hesitancy to part with a lifetime of old soap stubs; her insistence on saving unmatched socks….To which Merrie rouses from a slight slumber at the dinner table and adds, “Because you never know when a one-legged visitor will come to dinner!”

The next day, they head down to the storage unit, intending to “make room,” although this is not exactly what happens.

Wendy Do-It -- who looks up, who looks out, who looks forward, but who hardly ever looks back -- opens a slew of boxes…and falls in love with the past!

There are homework assignments from first grade. A science magazine and gossip rag she started in third. Her Girl Scout sash and patrol belt.

There is a badge from her first job, at the Capri movie theater, which says in extruded plastic letters: Wendy, Cashier.

There is her caricature from age sixteen, when she had bigger eyes and thinner thighs, which she props up against an old bookcase and photographs:

This will later become the beginning logo of UnderWoman. This is where and when the concept and name first take shape.

There is a filing drawer full of correspondence with former soul mates (some of whom she recognizes as soul mates only in retrospect). And don’t you know: There is the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

There are originals of AWARE, a magazine she started as part of her application for Mademoiselle’s guest editorship. There are snapshots and postcards from that glorious summer in New York. There are the hands-on food and farming articles that she wrote and photographed during a junior year in France. There is every element of her post-college career at Friends of WINE magazine, including a note from publisher Ron Fonte extolling the virtues of how good for and tough on each other they could be.

There is an article that her Dad, Archer, wrote for the magazine. There is the “Sunny Day Clause” she negotiated after one year on the job – establishing that, since she would do whatever it took to make the wine magazine and its 240-chapter international tasting society a success, and since she would never call in sick when she was not, that she reserved the right to go sailing with Dad when the weather was good and and/or to attend med school lectures with Hans when the subjects were interesting.

Okay. The archives ended there, for she had moved, with the magazine, to New York. And the rest resides in that city and state – crammed into a tree house of a Manhattan apartment and spanning an array of storage spaces from the outer boroughs to Brewster.

So she begins to unpack her brothers – likewise festooning the caged unit with their caricatures and accomplishments.

Admittedly, she has not so much “cleared out” as redecorated.

But it’s looking lively in Do-It storage land!

And then, she spies the real prize: In a box marked boldly, in red and black, on all six sides:

FUZZY! FUZZY! FUZZY! IMPORTANT: FUZZY! FUZZY! FUZZY!

UnderWoman's Fuzzy Story

At birth, Wendy Do-It, a.k.a. UnderWoman, was given a doll that she would love to death. (Quite literally, in most folks’ eyes.)

But Wendy Do-It showed them all: She would love Fuzzy FOR LIFE.

She loved that doll even when her clothes came off, her cloth skin turned gray, her bean stuffing started spilling away.

Fuzzy was growing balder, stinkier, and quite possibly more contaminated with each passing day.

Then, in one awful, memorable, pivotal move, Wendy’s parents threw Fuzzy down the garbage chute, where eventually, inevitably, she would go up in smoke….

For the first time that anyone can remember, Wendy Do-It fell silent...sulked, pouted, could not be lured back to gladness even through promise of pudding and ponies.

Finally, sucking in sadness, after repeated beseechings to “say something, anything,” she asked: “When I get old, will you throw me away?”

Whereupon Wendy’s Dad, Archer, immediately went down to the trash room, fished for hours, returned, triumphant. Wendy’s Mom, Merrie, cleaned and sewed Fuzzy with more tenderness and devotion than ever….As she would continue to, even when Fuzzy emerged from a long stint in storage and moved to Manhattan, where she gets a reprise....

Wendy Do-It Turns the Tables....

Wendy Do-It had motored along pretty well through a start-up studded career in magazines, music, film, television and technology.

But on the night of the storage unit incident, when EdLectric Seltzer saw the "treasures" that Wendy had bought up from the basement, and in light of the toughest economy that any of them had faced in their lifetimes, he asked:

“What if your best earning years are behind you?”

Though UnderWoman’s name had been conceived but moments before (and not yet registered on GoDaddy, trademarked, built out, even uttered aloud), it was the turnaround-type moment that her character was born for.

“Do you think that could be true?” she asked.

“Could well be.”

“Then you’d better run for cover,” shoots Wendy, “Because I’ll be moving in with Mom!”

By way of backstory, EdLectric had moved in with Mom a few years back...had come into Merrie's life many years after Archer Do-It’s passing, and had grown steadily more significant since.

By nature he was a Brooklyn bantam rooster -- bold, brash, smart, seasoned, living for and loving a good argument.

And he was smart enough to know when the tables were being turned…to appreciate it in fact.

After giving him a slight comeuppance, Wendy offers an easy out:
“The best is yet to be….”

To which EdLectric immediately responds: “Grow old along with me.”

“We’ll keep him Mom,” shouts Wendy to Merrie, who, as always, is dust-busting invisible particles from the kitchen floor, and does not hear….

EdLetric Signs as UnderWoman's Agent....

Thereafter, EdLectric is incentivized to become Wendy Do-It’s agent and biggest cheerleader….Or at least to come to her defense when Merrie lashes out in fear:

“I don’t know why Wendy wouldn’t be selling pencils or something. I mean, that’s what they did the last time around.”

Wendy Do-It searches for the most talented pencil maker and the most unique pencils in the world, and starts by selling three, to Merrie, for a profit, and by convincing Merrie to sell such pencils to her friends, who will in turn sell and gift them to their friends, and so on….

Merrie Do-It soon tires of this, and fears that she is becoming part of a multi-level marketing scheme -- all the worse for being perpetrated upon her by her own family and by then being perpetuated by her on her own friends.

She is weakened enough to protest less when the real truth comes out:

In an economy so bad that the big boys are not hiring Wendy Do-It to build their brands, Wendy Do-It will build her own. Among other things, she undertakes the documentary short and feature-length film of her dreams.

It will include going back to third grade with her teacher, Beverly Breckstein, and with her classmates -- most of whom have stayed in touch since that pivotal year, when they had started a magazine and made a movie that rendered their young learning alive, vibrant, visible and real.

And the new films may include some good-natured poking-of-fun at Merrie, who was so permissive back in the day, that when bro Grog shot his first film, “King Dong,” in sixth grade, for which he made a six-foot papier-mâché penis that Merrie allowed to stand erect in the Do-It back yard -- even though the DuMores and BoyCotts asked if it could at least be laid to rest at night so as to be less visible from their bedroom windows; to which Grog convincingly argued that it would get wet on the ground and needed to stand straight for structural reasons -- Merrie defended Grog and “Dong” in the face of neighbors.

Merrie seems fine with her role in yet another Do-It family film, with some caveats: Would it bring in money? Would it put at risk what little was left of hers?

Would Wendy finally be able to buy a new black purse that did not fray at the seams and that might adequately zip to begin with?

Wendy and Ed “Yes!” Merrie until she turns back to dust-busting invisible specks on the kitchen floor, at which point they return to their "Power of Wow" and “From Small to All” spreadsheets.

For these films, so close to her heart, so responsive to what she thinks the marketplace needs, Wendy is thinking big, budgeting well, unafraid to ask.

EdLectric will ask with her (or at least drive her to select meetings in the D.C. area).

At this point, he has as much skin in the game…as much to lose or gain...as she does.

As for the picture above, it's a pencil, people.

UnderWoman™ Gets A New Look: Her Old Self

UnderWoman™ likes her first logo.

Unlike days of brand building for Fortune 500s -- with rich budgets and art departments around the world -- UnderWoman™ Take One has cost $0!

She is proud to have done something semi-artistic on her own:

She has, without serious injury, used an Exacto® knife to cut an image from a photo of a caricature of herself at sixteen. This image leaps out from an egg cracking open, made by using a Sharpie® to nestle a W into a U. She loves the tag lines that this logo might lead to -- UnderWoman™ Hatches a Plan, UnderWoman™ Thinks Outside the Egg, UnderWoman™ Acts Over her Egg, and more.

She is confident that Exacto® and Sharpie® will sign on as sponsors soon.

Still, the feedback on the original UW logo does not come back unanimous:

Some say UW’s big eyes and thin thighs do no service to humanity in an already anorexic media environment. Others are upset that she is missing a left hand. (It had formerly held a “Sweet Sixteen” heart that Wendy found sappy and “accidentally” removed with a quick slip of the Exacto®.)

Undaunted, and taking all this feedback in stride, UnderWoman™ sets off in search:

At the Central Park Zoo, she susses out the caricaturists -- judging them on a weighted average of paper stock, pricing, boldness, accuracy, speed.

When she has found THE ONE, she presents him with her hope -- holding forth the cut-out figure, presenting her preferred Pantone Matching System® color palette, pointing to potential type faces, pontificating about the “happy medium” look that will "split the difference" between her younger self and her older self.

“Wait,” the Caricature King cuts her short: “You are looking for a LOGO, not a caricature!"

“Well, really more like a brand than a logo,” says UnderWoman™, quite pleased.

“I can’t just do that for you, here, in public, in the park,” he hisses, “lest everyone in the line behind you also seeks to be a brand.”

“And the problem with that would be?” asks UnderWoman™.

He hands her a card, and says, in loud whisper: “I mean, I would have to do this in private, at night, for more pay.”

UnderWoman™ balks, bargains: "Would you be willing to throw in some stocks of Obama, Oprah, Martha, Madoff? Sometimes UnderWoman™ wants to talk with them. UnderWoman™ also seeks thematic and seasonal backdrops as part of the packege. See! The cracking egg also resembles a tulip, which is especially heartening in the Spring. I'm thinking Colorforms®, paper dolls. And...."

“Please stop now," he says. "Google® me. E-mail me. Call me. But don't give people ideas...."

“Dessine-moi un mouton,” she says, as parting words.

He laughs...must know what she means.

But it may be months before they pursue this path again.

For now, other things take precedence....

UnderWoman™ & Entourage: Dessine-Moi?

UnderWoman™ decides that it’s best to proceed along “dessine-moi un mouton” lines.

On a typical day in the park, armed with all the tools of her trade and a few work-for-hire forms, she will beseech strangers to draw their views of she and her entourage.

Her first day out proves to be eventful:

Brisk-It, her Attention Deficit Disorder dog, runs off in all directions.

Pig-It, who has three legs, hops and limps along in sporadic bursts.

And Risk-It faints whenever excited or scared…which is always.

The progress seems slow. No people have been approached. No portraits have been drawn.

Risk-It faints yet again in the enthusiasm of entering Sheep’s Meadow...when the man from mysasthenia gravis night out comes running over, enthusiastic but a little "off."

It is as if they have not missed a beat, as if it has not been weeks since their one, last, strange, chance encounter.

He bends over Brisk-It as if to perform mouth to mouth:

“You didn’t tell me you had a myotonic goat!” he exclaims.

“And you, Good Sir, didn’t even tell me your name. But I was hoping we would meet again....”

And then, as she leans in towards goat and man, she smells something strange…..

UnderWoman & Entourage Encounter Buck in Rut

As she always does upon encountering a new smell -- be it good, bad, or as-yet undetermined -- UnderWoman files it away in the vast stores of her memory; compares and contrasts it to all that is catalogued there.

If she must, she will wait until she has the words to express what it is.

Meantime, the strange man is not even giving her his name.

Is that he can't? Or that he won't?

The smell emanating from him is vaguely urinous -- further reinforcing her impressions that the man could be homeless. But he also has an intelligent and regal air of mysteriousness that leads UnderWoman to believe that he might also be famous and/or infamous.

He uses a line that has worked on her before:

"Let us go then, you and I...."

It's a nice day. And UnderWoman has very little to lose.

So she follows him east from Sheep's Meadow, past the statue of Balto, slightly south towards the Central Park Zoo. Brisk-It, Risk-It and Pig-It are running ahead, lagging behind, leaping for joy, getting tangled underfoot.

The entourage enters the Central Park Zoo at 1 p.m., just as monkeys ring the brass bell of the Delacorte Clock and the festive dance of elephants, hippos and goats begins.

As they proceed southward, through the zoo, there is something about the entourage that is causing not only people...but also animals...to turn their heads.

Risk-It faints. Brisk-It pees on UnderWoman's pants leg. Pig-It is trying hard to telegraph something.

UnderWoman sees, and is mesmerized: The man whose name we do not yet know is in an intense eye-lock with a whitetail deer buck on the other side of the glass. The buck is going CRAZY. He is rearing up, pawing the sky, rubbing and banging his head against the wall.

For all intents and purposes, he appears to be in rut....

As Suspected....

At first, the nameless, urinous man seems to be vamping for the buck in rut – swishing his hips, running his hands through his longish hair.

It seems to be some instinct-driven and intense mating dance.

Our stranger is at turns coy and beckoning. The buck is….

The buck is….

The buck is about to break his way through the glass! Or so it seems to a growing throng of bystanders and to appear from stress fractures that have cracked the glass and are rippling out in concentric circles.

The man faints straightaway. The wall holds.

A park police officer in her Interceptor III is on the scene immediately:

“Ma’am, do you know this man?” she asks.

“He seems to be coming ‘round here a lot, and roiling up our animals when he does.”

“I think we should call 911,” says UnderWoman.

Just then, the man comes to.

He is on his knees, pleading: “Please, please, UnderWoman. Take me to Columbia Presbyterian. My memory’s coming back. I need…I need….A safe place to crash.”

OMG, she thinks, he IS an amnesic neurologist after all -- something that had occurred to her the first time they met.

“Okay, I’ll call an ambulance. I just wonder what we’ll do with….”

He glances at the animals, takes her hand: “Let us go on foot, with entourage. It will give us time to regroup, to recount.”

UnderWoman begins to call 911 anyway, just to cover all the bases; but instead calls her neurologist, the renowned Dr. Lewis Knowland.

He is there, as always.

“Ms. Do-It,” (he addresses her formally; has not yet met UnderWoman), “I suspected it a few weeks back, when you called. But now I’m fairly certain: Ms. Do-It, I believe you have found Brian Liebman. Can you bring him here?”

“We are on our way,” says UnderWoman. “But it could take time, as we are on foot and with entourage. Dr. Knowland, do you allow pigs in your office?”

“It is our preference and intent not to do so, Ms. Do-It. But that has never stopped them before….”

The Return of Brian

UnderWoman is not wowed by celebrities or cowed by military juntas.

But she is AWED by her rock-star neurologist, Dr. Lewis Knowland, who in addition to treating her myasthenia gravis, has run the Columbia University Neurological Institute for 40 of its 100 years, was editor of Neurology magazine for 20, and edits Merritt’s Textbook of Neurology, the teaching bible in most med schools.

Within moments of their arrival, even the “It” animals of the Do-It Family entourage have places of honor in Dr. Knowland’s inner sanctum, with its vast library, curiosity cabinets, medical treasures and oddities, and adjoining exam rooms.

“Ms. Do-It,” he says deferentially, while Brian is having his vitals checked, “You have indeed found Dr. Brian Liebman. He had gone on a solo game-hunting expedition to North Salem nearly a year back...and never came back.

"We tried every means of finding him in our power. But lacking any credible clues, he was presumed….”

“Presumed missing?” asks Brian, brightly, re-entering the room.
The two men embrace, take their places in plush red leather chairs.

The full story, albeit missing some key links, begins to unfold:

Dr. Liebman was a successful but somewhat reclusive neuroanatomist, working first with fruit flies in the labs of Richard Axel, Nobel laureate for his breakthroughs in the fields of olfaction/smell; and later in the labs of Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, with whom he mastered molecular models of memory and altered genes so as to induce and treat schizophrenia in mice.

He had always been considered both brilliant and a little bit off:

He could intuit and solve mathematical equations and scientific mysteries like nobody’s business. But then he would do something totally dense and obtuse, even endangering....

So it went with his determination to go on a solo hunting trip "upstate," when he had hardly ever been away from big cities or outside of academic institutions.

His hypo-manic studies of the olfactory systems of whitetail deer, coupled with excessive paraphernalia purchases from Gander Mountain, could be classified as....

BINGO! A light goes on for UnderWoman!

She should have known better! Seen sooner!

But at least it's beginning to dawn on her now....

With Undertones Of....

UnderWoman flashes back to her own first outing to Gander Mountain.

She had never been in a hunting and game store before.

She was wanting to pick up pointers about the art and science of the hunt…as well as some small gifts for her upcoming trip to the Do-It family farm, where Scoot and Grog and their kids would school her in gun safety, treat her to target practice, outfit her for the occasion, and take her on a shoot….

What had most drawn Wendy -- in a Middletown store the size of a Wal-Mart -- was the extensive selection of doe and buck urine…as many different varieties as she could find of wine and beer in a rural convenience mart.

The urines were tumbling all over each other in explanations and exclamations:

Wildlife Research Center’s® 2009 Special Golden Estrus®: Super Fresh natural whitetail deer doe urine with estrus secretions; harvested from one single doe; originally available exclusively to hunting industry insiders; every bottle labeled with its own serial number and “use by” date; put up in amber glass bottles to protect freshness; the smell your trophy buck has been waiting for. Note: Special Golden Estrus® is still highly effective when the year it was labeled for has passed, but the effectiveness drops to that of a normal top quality doe in estrus type scent.

Golden Estrus® Gel: Thick like honey; long lasting; drives bucks wild!

Code Red® Whitetail Doe Urine: Has a natural calming effect on bucks and does by signaling that other deer are in the area; trophy bucks are less likely to spook; works great as a curiosity attractant for bringing early and late season does into easy bow range.

Code Red® Whitetail Buck Urine: Early season bucks often travel in bachelor groups and are quick to check out the scent of a new intruding buck. Peak [sic] their curiosity with the scent of a new buck by pouring it into mock scrapes. Create the presence of an intruding buck during pre-rut by pouring Buck Urine in active scrapes. Dominant bucks ready to defend the territory will quickly seek out the competition….

There is equal shelf space dedicated to Wildlife Research Center’s® Scent Killer® brand: Scent Killer® spray, soap, body wash, shampoo, deodorant, laundry detergent, dryer sheets, field wash and more.

UnderWoman is sure she is beginning to get the picture, and beckons over a sales agent.

“So the idea is to mask human odor, and to apply deer odor, yes?” she asks.

“Oh no! God no!” says the agent, putting his hand on his forehead in horror, shaking them out: “Never apply doe or buck urine to yourself! Very strange and bad things have happened to people who do.

“Only apply doe, buck, elk, fox, coyote and other urines to Quik-Wiks®, Magnum Scrape-Drippers®, Trophy Leaf® and other off-body wicks and devices. Would you like help finding these? Are the urines in your hand for you, or someone else? Have you ever hunted before?”

UnderWoman does not hear the last question.

Instead, she is laughing hysterically, mortified and amazed, really, realizing the extent of her folly, imagining the possibilities, flashing back to a lifetime's worth of understandings and misunderstandings, and wondering why people, companies, products, countries and religions don't go further in their use of warning labels and disclaimers....

"I mean, there are so many of us" she burbles to the Gander guy, "Walking around with illusions, delusions, conceptions, misconceptions.. Some of them are funny! Some could be harmful....

"I'll show you mine if...."

At this point, her indulgent ex, who brought her to this store in the first place, takes pity on Gander Mountain man:

"I can't say this doesn't happen all the time. It's just that I don't see her enough to know." "WooHoo!" he whistles under his breath, embarassed, maybe. "Here we go...."

UW: "When I was a kid, in synagogue (but rarely), they kept mentioning the still, small voice. And I kept asking Mom, loudly (which was the only way I knew how to talk back then), why the voice was still small. I mean, it had been small for several years. Didn't it ever grow?

"And I ask you now, not as an intrusion into your belief system (which I hardly ever do except when I can't help not), but because I really want to know: Whose voice was it, anyway?"

UnderWoman Flashes Back

UnderWoman pauses for a moment, flashes further back…

The year is 1969. Man has supposedly landed on the moon. The Do-Its are celebrating at Peter Pan restaurant. Grog has stirred his Shirley Temple with a swizzle stick, and now is chewing on it.

“Oh my God! Oh my God!” Merrie covers her eyes, wrings her hands, shouts at the top of her lungs. “My son is eating crushed glass! Someone help us…..FAST!”

Grog’s face freezes -- mouth open, eyes rolled upward and back, in shock and fear – an expression the Do-It’s will mimic again and again on just such occasions.

Time stands still. Families turn heads. Sound goes silent.

And then, a brave waiter approaches.

“Ma’am,” he says, “The swizzle stick is made of rock candy. Your son is eating rock candy.”

All laugh....

UnderWoman's First Hunt....

Despite being satisfied with the scent killers and scent enhancers she had bought to the table, UnderWoman’s first hunting trip had not gone as planned:

First, Scoot had placed her in a padded suit that made her look like Elmer Fudd, and had photographed her from the most unflattering angles.

Then, assorted guns or rifles…or whatever you called them…had powerful kickbacks for which she was unprepared.

And all chastised her on the morning of the hunt, when they had risen at 4:00 a.m., and dressed all in cammo, albeit with bright splashes of orange…as if to signify paradoxically, that they were both of nature and in no way part of nature.

“Even her feet can’t be quiet,” they chided her. “Hear how she tromps through fallen leaves and breaks branches underfoot! No bucks will be stopping by this day!”

On the car ride home, UnderWoman was dazed and contused.

As she was dozing in the back seat, with EdLectric and Atomic Seltzer (Ed’s son) arguing loudly up front, Merrie Do-It tried to read soothingly and instructively to her.

Merrie: “Here’s a story about a UVA medical school student with an 8-month-old son who was spelunking in a cave in Oregon and fell to his death. You have to be careful. Do you remember when your Dad was caught in a cave?”

“Mom, it was a rock, The Lemon Squeezer, in a tourist trap in New Hampshire.”

Merrie: “You always make light of me and your Dad! But the rocks were real. Franconia Notch, remember?”

UnderWoman: “There were guides and guards everywhere. And a sign that warned folks not to go into the Lemon Squeezer if they were adults or at all claustrophobic. Dad was stuck for like, what, 15 minutes?”

“Still, it was scary....”

UnderWoman remembers that trip for another reason: On what was planned as a pit stop en route to New Hampshire, Wendy Do-It became enamored with Manhattan -- was convinced that it was where she was from and where she always would be.

Grog, on the other hand, would be taken with nature, with New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and would decide to base his life on the great outdoors.

None of them were too happy about the drive, however.

While Merrie and Archer argued bitterly about the best way to and from Mount Washington from their Mittersill Alpine Resort, Wendy had an asthma attack in the back seat. Grog threw up in a bucket. And Scoot stuck his hand in it.

Archer, always the optimist, speculated that Scoot would become the doctor in the family.

He was right!

But back to Brian…..

Brian = Brain, Scrambled

Brian stands for “brain” scrambled…which his certainly was.

While they are waiting for lab results, Dr. Knowland updates Brian on progress at the Neurological Institute – advances in mitochondrial DNA, markers for Parkinsons and Alzheimers and the like.

When she can get a word in, UnderWoman jumps in with her hypothesis:

“Brian, had you purchased doe or buck urine for your hunt?”

“Of course!”

"And what did you do with it?"

"Well, first I masked my own scent, and then...."

He trails off there.

He bites his lip and narrows his eyes, which focus upper left.

He is searching for something. Remembering something.

UnderWoman now recalls her own experience with the scents, and where and when she had first smelled something urinous on Brian.

"Brian. Brian...." UnderWoman calls him out from a kind of reverie.

"Brian. Did you apply Doe in Estrus scent behind your ears?"

Brian and The Buck That....

What follows is too much to condense into one post, or an entire comic book, but it makes for GREAT late night television.

Apparently Brian had applied Wildlife Research Center’s® 2009 Special Golden Estrus® behind his ears, on the soles of his boots…and elsewhere…for his solo game expedition to North Salem, New York.

Within an hour of being in the woods, he was accosted by a rowdy young buck who found him irresistible.

His guns were not yet loaded, so they tussled “mano-a-mano” so to speak.

He’s not sure when or how he went unconscious, or what happened to him while he was out.

But he came to with absolutely no memory of the incident…or of himself for that matter.

His head ached. He was badly bruised. Vague emotions of shame, humiliation, uneasy satisfaction and perverse curiosity were wreaking havoc on him. And oh yes, he had intact recall of 16th Century Italian poetry and Mahler’s symphonies.

He was trying to piece all this together, when a man, seemingly with myasthenia gravis, stumbled upon him.

The man asked some questions.

Brian gave the same answer to all:

“The buck didn’t stop there!”

“The buck didn’t stop there!”

The man, who we later learn is David Letterman, at first thought to call the police, or an ambulance.

But after sharing a few Single Malt Scotches with Brian, he became enamored of the man....For even if he had only one line -- "The buck didn’t stop there!” – at least it was a good one!

Now, Brian, Dr. Knowland and UnderWoman begin weaving together some of the missing pieces:

David Letterman brings Brian back to the city, and wants to have him on the Late Show as a special guest.

But Brian “spooks” and runs off into the city, which, although once his home, is now utterly unfamiliar to him.

It is only in the Central Park Zoo that Brian finds some level of comfort.

What prompts him to still dab Special Golden Estrus® behind his ears, we can only guess.

But UnderWoman is pretty sure of is this -- that the David Letterman who found Brian Liebman in the woods was not myasthenic (indeed, the incident had predated Brian’s myasthenic moments with UnderWoman in Central Park), but rather, intoxicated...symptoms of which are sometimes mistaken for MG.

Brian considers this carefully. Thinks for a moment. And then asks, to everyone’s surprise:

“Dr. Knowland, have you ever considered working with large animals?”

Buck U.

UnderWoman and Brian are "of the same school" so to speak:

Each is armed with an impressive array and depth and knowledge in their chosen fields....And those fields range far!

They also tend towards a "selective" daftness that amuses some, befuddles many, and can be downright dangerous to self and others.

For example, UnderWoman manages her own "medical adventure" with the unflinching astuteness of a physician and the prowess of a film producer.

She coalesces and severs medical communities via lectures, stand-up comedy routines and her blog, Trephinations, which drills down on health issues and serves up solutions.

Last week, when her primary care practice had troubles deciphering the extensive blood workup requested by one of her specialists, she got on the Internet and coached the team to and through Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate and the lavender-topped test tube it should be taken in.

But when she bought Pig-It to her PET scan and Hunter to her CAT scan, people wondered....

Likewise, Brian has been lauded for the gene-altering breakthrough that allowed Kandel's lab to induce schizophrenia in mice...thereby enabling researchers to better understand and treat this refractory condition.

Yet all were shocked when he showed up for work one day in full cammo gear, carrying rifles, and announcing that he would be off in search of "big game" over the weekend.

We kind of know what happened next....

UnderWoman and Brian In The Cold Room....

Both UnderWoman and Brian have a bit of an obsession with underwear...especially LONG UNDERWEAR.

To begin with, they LOVE to layer.

UnderWoman is prone to starting with silk and/or very fine, thin cotton.

Brian tends towards synthetics and high tech.

UnderWoman adores winter for its crisp cold; for the occasional scent of pure ozone cracking the air; for snow, in all its forms; for cross-country skiing, vensison stew, red wine...and for the ability to lavish layers of cashmere, feathers and fur on top of cotton and silk.

Brian finds her look intriguing: With her marauder boots, her silk long undies, her long lynx coat, tasteful and restrained cammo accents, she appears to be the hunter and the hunted at once.

UnderWoman finds Brian to be a synesthetic study in contrast: His polypopylene underlayers hold the body odor in. His Goretex outerwear still hints of doe urine. And there's something smokey, peaty, musky, heady about him: A fire he had lit in the woods? Dried fruit undertones from custom-blended pipe tobacco? Islay Single Malt? Civet?

At any rate, while they refuse to call it "a date," on this day, without entourage, Brian and UnderWoman head to Burton Boards of SoHo, where they take inspiration from the company's hard-core credo:

"We stand sideways. We sleep on floors in cramped resort hotel rooms. We get up early and go to sleep late. We've been mocked. We've been turned away from resorts that won't have us. We are relentless. We dream it, we make it, we break it, we fix it. We create. We destroy. We wreck ourselves day in and day out and yet we stomp that one trick or find that one line that keeps us coming back. We progress."

There, B. and U. enter the sub-zero Cold Room -- arrayed in their own regalia and trying on paraphernalia from Burton's new Analog line as ruse.

UnderWoman recites from Burton's "Love Letters to a Mountain" campaign a few years back, in which snowboarders wrote postcards to the Sierra Nevadas, Rockies and Alps; how they bought their passions to the peaks...and were sometimes given hard knocks and crushed bones in return; yet took it in stride.

Brian synthesizes from Mark Helrin's "Winter's Tale" -- a 700-page tome that UnderWoman knows by heart -- lives in fact -- savoring the snow and the ice as she does; her thermoses, thick blankets and headlamp always at the ready for a fresh fall; living out of doors...dawn, dusk, daylight, night; with friends and loved ones or alone; tracking animals; reading and writing poetry; watching old movies ("Dr. Zhivago" is a favorite for these occasions) in the Pinetum of Central Park; seeing stars; casting shadows.

Does she say it aloud, or not? All the raccoons who have come to her side. The raccoon who traversed her windowsill one sunset. The fox family. Her relationship with Pale Male and other birds of prey. The significance of animals in her life....Even alabaster animals as they emerged from the backs of alabaster women, children and men as seen at a Chelsea art show last week. And like the spirit-guide animals of "Golden Compass" (even if the physics of that film fell short for her tastes). And the boy at Green Chimneys who called her "princess" and recognized her...and himself...as every animal in the Native American wheel.

It is almost too much to bear!

She pours ice water on Brian.

They wait a while.

Wetness does not penetrate.

Dryness holds.

They are warm despite deep freeze.

They will be fine! They will be more than fine....

Clean Slate Club?

For their remaining moments in Burton's Cold Room, UnderWoman and Brian make plans:

They will go next door to The Evolution Store, with its A - Z of animals and minerals ranging from anatomic human models and thousands of iridescent butterfly wings to taxidermy tools and juvenile zebra skulls.

They will head north to the Bergdorf Goodman Men's Store, where trophy heads sport Burberry scarves and where the windows are dressed with "Fantastic Mr. Fox" sets.

And all of this is just south of the Central Park Zoo and the Alice in Wonderland statue. And....

UnderWoman is thinking she will get a line like "Let us go then, you and I" from Brian.

But instead there is a WILD -- afraid, agonizing, despairing, determined -- look in his eyes.

She takes off his Analog outerwear and rushes him outside.

He can hardly catch his breath.

She stewards him from the busy streets of SoHo to the relative calm of Freeman Alley, and into the sanctuary of Freemans, with its hunting lodge decor and hearty menu.

"Listen, UnderWoman," says Brian. "This is really all too much for me....The vague, horrific memories I am harboring; the unfettered hope I feel; the way these memories and hopes wreak real, physical havoc on my heart and brain.

"I know it will sound odd, but I was watching a 'House' episode on Sunday night. A firefighter had undergone so many physical and mental traumas that even the 'idea' of work or women put him into such a state that....Well, they decided that it was too extreme to induce a medical coma of indeterminate length. So they opted instead for a form of electroshock that would wipe his whole slate clean....

"I called Gregory House yesterday. He will be meeting me at Dr. Knowland's tomorrow. He thinks that erasing the traumatic memories might be my best, my only way out. But there is the risk that this will erase all of my memories.

"From my studies of, experience with and experiments in memory, I do believe that there are types of memories...and ways of making, storing and retrieving memories.. that render them indelible. I think it's possible that these kinds of memories live on...in cellular ways, and all ways.

"UnderWoman, I am hoping that you will help me make these kinds of memory today."

Refresh My Memory....

What can UnderWoman say?

It is the best proposal she has gotten in a LONG TIME.

As she and Brian stroll north on Fifth Avenue, the "Fanstastic Mr. Fox" figures in the windows of Bergdorf Men's seem to be cheering them on....

In Every Sense....

Never has a trip north through the park been so well narrated through the senses.

They DO gather moss.

They kneel in a grassy knoll.

UnderWoman tells Brian the sexiest story she knows:

Nestled between the breasts of Romeo and Juliet, robins had built their nest this Spring.

It was an odd thing, because the nest was at eye level for most New Yorkers.

And there was a debate about whether to remove or protect it.

In the end, protection prevailed. And many stood guard until the babies fledged and the nest could be moved to higher ground.

"THIS is my home town," UnderWoman gestures to the park and the city at large.

She references a recent Smithsonian article that presents New Yorkers as a highly involved species of people pre-selected for higher energy and ambition.

She quotes Edna St. Vincent Millay, as writ large in the new terminal:

"We were very tired, we were very merry -- we had gone back and forth all night on the ferry."

And Helen Keller: "Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream."

Brian closes his eyes....

BrainSearchery....

The next day, UnderWoman, Dr. Knowland, Dr. Kandel and Brian are awaiting the visit of Dr. Gregory House.

It is possible that soon, Brian Liebman will have his memories wiped out.

But first, UnderWoman wants to try something.

She has created a form of BrainSearchery....