Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Movie break: Beatles-in-Hamburg* Woody: Take the Money and Run (1969)

In a sub-series: Backtracking thru the Woodland

Also fits this series:
“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films


* “Beatles-in-Hamburg” as a modifier means early in the given artist’s career, when many of the elements of his/her work/art were already present, if in rudimentary form. See End note for more.

Subsections below:
Among staples, Jewish jokes and the pretty girlfriend/partner/wife
More Allenesque staples: Psychological/family background, and sex jokes
Appearances by longtime associates; production partners
Miscellaneous details or observations

[Edits 11/28/14. Edit 12/8/14.]

Take the Money and Run (1969) may be among the very few Woody Allen films that are most familiar to those only casually interested in or knowledgeable of him, along with the likes of Sleeper (1973) and Annie Hall (1977). It was the first film—and under what would become the long tradition of the Rollins/Joffe producing banner—that he both starred in and wrote-and-directed.

It also presents the gag-a-minute type of humor with which he became so tightly associated by the mid-1970s that, by Stardust Memories (1980), when this latter film was interpreted as being simply about him, its line about the fictional director’s “older, funnier” movies became among the received critical (and public) wisdom about Allen in the decades of his subsequent career. This implied he had been “at his best” or “at his most crowd-pleasing” when doing quickly-ratcheted-out comedy, as if he were the tasty novelty of a comedian doing a standup routine in writing movies, rather than the writer of probing themes that he gravitated toward and preferred to work as, starting in the 1980s.

Take the Money, actually, makes us appreciate, in his later films, how much a screenwriter of depth and subtlety Allen is at his best. Yet this film’s humor often still hits home today, and it’s surprising to note how much of the Allen that most generally expresses himself throughout his many films still comes through this early and admittedly homely, sometimes clunky work.

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The film is a mock documentary about the life of a small-time crook named Virgil Starkwell who rises from being an enormous bumbler (in trying to be streetwise and to pull off petty crimes in his youth), to eventually being successful enough as a bank robber that, near the film’s end, he gets 800 years in prison (which, the narrator [Jackson Beck; 1912-2004] intones, Virgil feels he can cut in half with good behavior).


Among staples, Jewish jokes and the pretty girlfriend/partner/wife

There are various Jewish jokes, a feature that at the time was on the edgy side, and in Allen’s case probably was seen as an inevitable consequence of Allen’s being a New York–tuned Jewish standup comic. Here, we find, for example,

* the squabbling, digression-making, Ashkezani-inflected parents (and, not a necessarily Jewish trait, in silly disguises), who are interviewed sporadically (though Virgil’s full name doesn’t really sound Jewish);

* the prison episode where, after volunteering to be a guinea pig on which an experimental vaccine is tried out, Virgil develops the side effect of turning temporarily into a rabbi (complete with black brimmed hat, bushy beard, and aptness to pedantically discourse on the meaning of eating matzoh during Passover); and

* a funny scene with Virgil in a prison chapel, obviously Christian (Catholic), with him being sneaked homemade weapons by an intended-breakout accomplice while they are in the pews, and (as intended cover, yet by an obvious fictional clod about observing religious proprieties) Virgil engaging incongruously in the type of rhythmic rocking that religious celebrants do in Jewish temples.

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There is also the Allenesque touch of having a girlfriend/wife for Allen’s character who, at least in the looks department, seems out of his league, which side character probably at this early stage of his career reflected merely the producer demand to have an attractive leading lady to add some romance and sex appeal to the story for marketing purposes (as any big-audience director’s debut would have been expected to do).

Here, the leading female is Janet Margolin (1943-93) as Louise, a young laundress Virgil stumbles on accidentally and almost immediately becomes smitten by. Virgil is about to snatch her purse in a town park when she alertly eyes him, and he catches himself, and then he moves discreetly/awkwardly to a friendly conversation about amateur artwork she is doing. They are an item from then on.

Margolin had her acting debut in the respectful mental-inpatient drama David and Lisa (1962), and worked for Allen again in Annie Hall, as the city-intelligentsia-conscious wife who apparently has trouble making love without Valium.

An interesting touch in Take the Money—whose setting is (largely) San Francisco—has Virgil and Louise going on a date to Ernie’s, the famous restaurant with the red walls that is reproduced in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). One amusing detail: notice how, when Allen’s Virgil drops a handful of change into the waiter’s hand as a tip, a woman to the left on the screen (an extra) is looking steadily (and a little scandalized?) at what has fallen on the floor, as if she didn’t expect this move.


More Allenesque staples: Psychological/family background, and sex jokes

In the film’s fastidious mock-biographical manner, family history is presented comically (Louise, it turns out, was adopted by a career-military father, who after 30 years “catapulted” to the rank of corporal, and a religious mother who had conversations with God about, among other things, interior decorating). Allen, of course, would prove for many years to be conscious of this robust way of looking at aspects of character; it would appear in many forms through many of his later films, not just in the similar Zelig (1983), but in ones where family background, whether or not including mental illness, is invoked importantly.

Even an early form of Allen’s patented sex jokes turns up. In a sort of monologue comprising his brief turn at voiceover narrating of his story (temporarily taking over from Beck—an artist’s-license move), shortly after meeting Louise, Virgil remarks about having talked with a prison psychiatrist about sex. The p-doc, following up on his question about whether Virgil had a girlfriend, had asked him if he thought sex is dirty, and Virgil recounts that he answered, “Well, it is if you’re doing it right.”


Appearances by longtime associates; production partners

At this early stage in his career—not that I know it all really well—Allen had help from people he’d already been working with, in lesser-film fare. Mickey Rose (1935-2013), a student-days friend, is his co-writing partner here, as he would be for Bananas (1971). Rose had helped him with the drive-in-style comic riot What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966).

Interestingly, Allen’s start here as writer/director/star almost didn’t happen; in Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen (Knopf, 2007; p. 335; speaking within November 2005-November 2006), Allen notes, “When I wrote Take the Money and Run with Mickey Rose, Jack Rollins [Allen’s longtime manager] didn’t want me to appear in and direct a film because he felt like there might be some kind of backlash, like, ‘Who is this wunderkind? Who does he think he is?’ And I didn’t care about directing it. I just didn’t want someone to ruin it. So it was hard to get anybody [a studio] interested in Take the Money and Run.” Palomar Pictures International ended up being the producing studio, and accepted the multi-role situation that Allen presented, presumably because, as Allen says, it “was a new company and they couldn’t deal from strength.”

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For Take the Money, Allen would have the services of several film editors, but Ralph Rosenblum (1925-95) is listed in the credits as a consultant: actually, he was brought in to perform crucial reworking of some of the film’s editing, giving it such tweaks as the interspersing of comments by Virgil’s parents; this is recounted in Lax, p. 270. Rosenblum would be ranked as the full editor for the next film. Rosenblum would work as sole/main editor for Allen up through Interiors, on every film Allen directed except Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex… (1972).

Also, Jack Grossberg is an associate producer here; he would be full producer on the next film, and would be associated with Allen’s work at least as late as, I think, Sleeper.

Marvin Hamlisch (1944-2012) scored music for virtually the entire film, as he would do for Bananas; this was not Allen’s usual method for his films from about Sleeper on.

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Louise Lasser, who was married to Allen for a few years until 1970, appears toward the end as a “person on the street” commenting about Virgil. (She would costar with Allen in Bananas and would also be in Everything You Always Wanted….) Lasser here is giving some streetwise comments, basically riffing on the notion that Virgil had seemed like (for one measure) such a schlemiel, and yet was a master criminal. She ends with an expression I think I have right: “Go know, right?”—which may have been hip in those days, but I’m not sure what it means unless it is “Go figure.”

The voices in the film are largely what sounds now like flat and rather expressionless blats; similar can be found in 1970s films. I guess we Americans got more inflection-wielding and with a certain general lilt in our talk while (perhaps as a semi-cause) society has gotten more technologically advanced, or whatever other societal correlate of the voice phenomenon may be relevant. Allen, however, is familiar to us with the Brooklyn touches to his voice. He even has thinning hair here, as he would familiarly have later: going bald on the back-top of his head, and receding front hairline, leading to his characteristic uneven front hairline, with its comb-over, or whatever that is.


Miscellaneous details or observations

* Allen originally had an ending far different from what the film has; it would have entailed a shootout, with Virgil killed messily, reminiscent of the end of Bonnie and Clyde (1967). But there would have been a comic twist, with Louise (and her son by Virgil) visiting his grave, and (as the two leave) Virgil from underground (?) giving them a “Psst!” as if he was still alive. The scene was filmed, and included even special effects for gunshot wounds, courtesy of A.D. Flowers, the famed special-effects man who later worked for Francis Ford Coppola, among others. But this ending was scrapped (see Lax, p. 134).

* Various story details seem to echo (by artifice, of course) Allen’s real life, such as the birth date of Virgil being Allen’s. There are also touches of Virgil being characterized as an “atheist” (including by his own father) and a “pinko”—similar is done regarding Allen’s character of Fielding Mellish in Bananas—which both reflects the cultural/populist bugbears of the time and perhaps echoes some features of Allen’s late-’60s/early-’70s intellectual orientation (arguable; or what may have been compatible with it) that maybe he was playing for laughs as well as being a bit daring about presenting.

There are also jokes in the later film about Mellish’s being a college dropout, which perhaps Allen was a bit embarrassed about his being then, and certainly wasn’t later. (The underscoring of anti-communist paranoia is also shown in the fictional FBI agent, Daniel Miller, toward the end of the film, who is noted as having authored a book, Mother Was a Red.)

But the classical instrument Virgil takes up as a youth, a cello, is an incongruously nerdy instrument for a street “gamin” like him; but it is not the clarinet that, in real life, Allen ended up mastering.

* The instrumental song (by Quincy Jones) “Soul Bossa Nova,” which is familiar to younger audiences through the Austin Powers series (1997-2002), underscores one sequence in this film, but it is played somewhat differently here.


End note.

The Beatles, as you know, did their most act-solidifying early work as a managed house band of sorts in a few clubs in Hamburg, Germany, from 1960 to 1962 (starting with the Indra Club and then the Kaiserkeller). Bob Spitz’s comprehensive if flawed and occasionally biased biography on the group from 2005 (Little, Brown) is arguably at its most interesting when it recounts, in surprising detail, the band’s early professional history that is similar to that of many a local American garage or bar band: young slobs pounding away at their act in obscure venues with dreams of the big time.

Also, the recent book Beatles  vs. Stones by John McMillian (Simon & Schuster, 2013), comparing The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, shows its obvious bias toward the latter group, but I think the question of which group was greater (in the 1960s) is both silly and easily answered: The Beatles were greater, if no other reason than because, by 1962, they had long paid their dues in grungy work for about two years as an apprentice band usually covering other writers’ songs, with occasional original numbers, which period of extended, rugged apprenticeship the Stones never went through. And of course, the Stones rode the tidal wave of British-band “mania” that the Beatles helmed that allowed the Stones to come to prominence.

In terms of the literal image that “Beatles-in-Hamburg” connotes, think of the band in stinky leather jackets in later 1960 (and consider the picture, from whenever, of John Lennon with a toilet seat around his neck). Think of them playing like maniacs in a seedy club patronized by boorish German sailors, the band fueled by the stimulant Preludin and beer, and heeding the exhortations of Bruno Koschmider, the German club owner/manager who told them to “Mach Schau!” (“Make show!”; this more literally can be read as something like "Power up a show!," but you get the drift; anyway, on this latter, see The Beatles’ autobiography from 2000 [Chronicle Books], p. 47, and Spitz, p. 209).

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

OFAD 7: Connecting with Lefty: Finally getting my Medicaid card, to square with the ACA demand

Mission accomplished, but for ACA cheerleaders, count me out of your short list (or your long list)

Guys don’t seem to be called “Lefty” anymore.

—George Carlin, in Napalm & Silly Putty (New York: Hyperion, 2001) (this is the sort of name my title refers to; I am not saying “Lefty” to make any insinuation about Obamacare being “leftist”; i.e., I figuratively mean Lefty as in a local shady operator like, as suppositional examples, Louie the Lip or Joey Ding-Dong)

Subsections below:
I. Wonders never cease: Getting answers on my ACA “oblivion” situation
II. Connecting with Lefty, so to speak
III. Maybe it ain’t over till the jackass-automaton Marketplace e-mailing genie sings further

[Edit 11/19/14. Edit 11/20/14.]

Some of this was written before the climactic mid-November stuff recounted below, and the rest is written before I have my Medicaid card in hand, so I’m hoping things pan out completely, so this story won’t be for naught.

Some of this experience involved trooping around “like a lay social worker” fairly similarly to how I’d done for others back in my VISTA days (1986-87) and, much later, amid busy help-to-others in a support-group milieu from about July 2001 to, say, 2006. Except now it was just for me, when the Great Leap Forward of the Affordable Care Act ostensibly seemed to be another big, beneficent, civic-oriented helping hand extended magnanimously by Washington but ended up seeming—because of the federal level’s occasional rattletrap nature (combined with state inadequacy)—to require local yokels to scrape around desultorily for (figuratively speaking) box-tops, rubber bands, and old lottery tickets in Palookaville.

By the way, in criticizing it, I don’t expect to be considered along the cartoonish, black-and-white lines by which pro- and anti-ACA thinking has been cast. For instance, I agree with those who dismiss the Republicans as having no improved (or any) alternative to the ACA. And personally I feel the Republican idea that, to get health insurance, all people need to do is get jobs is almost criminally wrong (as to facts and otherwise). But, even after having voted mainly Democratic for about 34 years, I would not cheerily wave the flags for the ACA, given all its many flaws, big and small. This after I was among those in the 1990s who was supportive in some sense of the Clinton attempt at such a program.

This narrative may seem to be a bit detailed, but it shows the hoops you have to go through, which I feel after all I’ve been through in my life comprise a fairly big impertinence. And I went through this without really being enthusiastic about doing so, and I also spare you the curse words and such that might have peppered this “walk through a shadowy land.”


I. Wonders never cease: Getting answers on my ACA “oblivion” situation

So I finally went out to the office in Sussex County, N.J., of NORWESCAP, which I had first heard about at a distance, completely new to it and wonder-minded at age ~25, in very late 1986 or early 1987, when I was working in VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America, since ~1994 part of AmeriCorps; my stint was at a location in Somerset County, N.J.). This (in 2014) was where I thought I’d get answers on why—if I’d signed up via the federal “Marketplace” Web site in late 2013, and had gotten info on having an assigned policy number in winter 2014—I still had no Medicaid card by this month (November 2014) and had been informed via impersonal e-mail by the “Team” at the federal Marketplace that I had not finished signing up, etc.

(By the way, I had long ruled out phoning NJ FamilyCare again. After three tries in the winter, with just an inadequate mechanized response, and knowing they’d been overwhelmed with Medicaid-extension processing in the winter anyway, why expect to get anywhere lately with them?)

I’d heard (in a local newspaper, I think), probably in fall 2013, that in this county NORWESCAP was handling the administrative task of helping people get signed up for ACA insurance; NORWESCAP is a sort of charitable organization, mainly meant for low-income people in several counties in the state. I’d thought I would contact it (stop by, if I could) shortly after Election Day (as a matter of practical realities and slight lack of enthusiasm about this whole ACA “project”) and before the start of the new signup period, which I’d heard was to kick off about November 15 (which, of course, it has).

Also, it was to follow the fairly unitary-and-exclusive (emotionally and practically) period of hospital care for my mother, which ended in late October. She had a tumor successfully removed, in a same-day-surgery sort of situation (which resulted in a few days of inpatient stay for her). The tumor was a sarcoma (the third such she’s had; the first in 2001-02 and 2011), for those who’ve followed this thread in my stories. The doctors seem to see no reason to feel there are any malignant remainders of the tumor in her, though apparently she is going to have her periodic scans more frequently again.

On November 6, I was out in the county seat of Newton to renew my driver’s license. I wasn’t sanguine about how well that would go (I think, at age almost-53, I seem to have virtually lost all faith in government doing the simplest things), but it went much better than I’d expected. I felt that, once that was done, the rest of the day should be “mundane chores that I would semi-fondly embrace.”

It took some work to locate the NORWESCAP office. There was a lot of footwork, but I guess you could say I was determined. Slogging along with umbrella, I checked at the county administration building. Got a phone number there from some helpful-enough women in the County Clerk’s office, and some vague info on possible address. There was a reference by the women to NORWESCAP’s office being near the main library building. That place I knew well, having gone there a lot in years past. I went out to the library on this rainy day. I got in (construction there made for an awkward new temporary entrance), and finally got info from a helpful library reference-department worker on NORWESCAP’s address.

(You may wonder, why didn’t I look this up on the Web myself? I basically felt I’d locate NORWESCAP readily enough “on foot” as part of my going to Newton for my license renewal. [To kill two birds with one stone, in part.] Plus, I had a foggy memory of NORWESCAP having been in a building near the center of Newton that I used to stop at 12 or 14 years ago. In the old days, I used to tramp around to different social-service places in Newton [by car and/or on foot] when I was more up to my neck in the support-group jazz [through roughly 2006], and in those days I did a lot of literal footwork by preference. Almost as a practical echo, I felt doing my business in Newton this month on foot wasn’t too bad an idea. As it turned out, the address for NORWESCAP I got, on Halsey Road [in Frankford or Hampton township], could have been gotten online [assuming the Google info wasn’t outdated, which sometimes happens].)

Then I had a heck of a time finding the building they were in. I had a number for the street address, but the building—which also housed a business—was surprisingly hard to find. Once there, I found you had to ring a buzzer at NORWESCAP, and wait for an answer—you couldn’t just walk in.

Now the (to me) humor-appropriate stuff started. This was like ringing at a speakeasy. I stated my business and was buzzed in. A helpful woman talked to me; I gave her my “quick brief”—“I signed up last year, nothing in the mail, got a policy number, called NJ FamilyCare,” etc. (you might know the saga from my past OFAD entries), and she seemed to answer as if she’d heard roughly the same from others before. She was efficient in giving me terse info, including a flier giving info on whom to phone in Denville, N.J. (in Morris County; the actual location would appear to be different), who would be my next best bet.

(She said her office here handled just family something-or-other. She also made some reference to X program for people 55 and over, though she didn’t give me the relevant flier, as [she said] it was outdated. I guess I looked 55 or older. I certainly had looked like walking death when my new driver’s license photo was first taken.)

I said thanks, and was ready to go.

This was like getting a tip like, in growly voice, “Call dis number, ask for Lefty. He’ll hook you up wid your connection.” I mean, the woman was nice, but how rickety a system, in its national and local branches, this suggested for delivering nationally mandated health insurance. Not that the NORWESCAP people weren’t (in their locally responsible way) earnest in providing what they could.

Now, as it would turn out, there was more gritty tracking down of the right person, and getting the problem ironed out, for me to do.


II. Connecting with Lefty, so to speak

I called the number I was given, on a Friday, somewhat late in the day, November 7 (at some point I found the relevant NORWESCAP office was in Rockaway Township, N.J.), and I left a detailed-enough message. The next day (Saturday, November 8) I sent an e-mail after I’d looked up the NORWESCAP entity online, saw several addresses, and found that you could e-mail a message to the office of your choice. (I didn’t realize NORWESCAP had started as a poverty-addressing arm of Johnson’s Great Society program. The Great Society had long been, at least vaguely, a sort of solid-metes-and-bounds of U.S. government standard for me, though it has become as faded and decayed as a morning’s dream you can barely remember.) I composed a succinct-yet-thorough-enough e-mail and sent it.

On Monday, November 10, I found there was a phone message, left on one of my numbers, by the person who had received and/or chosen to answer the e-mail. She gave useful info. I transferred this to audiotape to listen to it again.

On Tuesday, November 11, I called the number that it seemed I should first call, but I got a lot of ringing, no answer. Sensibly, one could conclude the office was closed for Veterans Day, but I didn’t know for sure if I was calling a state office or not. (Turned out, I was.)

On the morning of Wednesday, November 12, I called the number again, and now I got a live person, no mechanized system. (I would find, only for sure via a piece of mail I received within days, that this was a Medicaid office in Paterson. Not only had it not occurred to me to try, out of the blue and instead of NORWESCAP, to call the state Medicaid office directly, but I didn’t even know there was one in Paterson.)

I explained my situation: I’d applied on the federal Web site, had gotten nothing (in the mail…), and had found I had a policy number but got nothing else over months, etc.

I found from this person (she seemed to read rather perfunctorily, almost to herself, from what she found on her computer) that my policy had been effective X date last winter, and a card was mailed out to my street address (on Y date).

I never received it, I told her. (I probably explained that my street address could not be used to mail things.)

In fact, not that I would have explained this in detail to her, HERE (in the ACA techno-doings regarding what address they used) WAS ONE BIG SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM OF WHY I NEVER GOT MY CARD. And I will explain something here that may sound like grumbling about another weird set of ways of my household for decades, but here really isn’t meant to be.

(Sidebar—note on how I do a “slalom run” in talking about family issues. You see, I hold off on giving the full set of stories on household jazz that, variously in my practical life, throws me for a loop, in big ways and small, as much as I might seem [to you] to spill an awful lot of beans on my blogs. The way my family is, I still very discreetly hold off on telling some things and speaking about others. This may seem arbitrary to outsiders, and even does a bit to me at times, but I think it follows in a very good-faith manner [or as good-faith a “policy” as is possible under the circumstances] how I talk about family stuff, which latter is relevant enough to me as a writer [going back to the 1980s] but reaches points where “holds” on releasing info should be observed, for reasons I either explicitly offer or not.)

My household has not had a street address for mail, ever. We have had the same P.O. box since 1965 or 1966, even before there were (as a matter of instituted infrastructure here) any street boxes in the neighborhood (which started about the early 1970s). My mother has long stayed with the P.O. box, staunchly refusing to have a street box (even after numerous homes on our street, and throughout the local community of Barry Lakes, have had street boxes for years), for reasons I won’t go into now. This has led, over many years, to (before the Patriot Act) various people (in situations where their requiring address info is at play, when you fill out forms, or whatever) being surprised that we only have a P.O. box, and we say please use that, otherwise our mail can’t be delivered….

Post–Patriot Act, there have been more occasional rigorous demands from various entities for a street address along with a P.O. box, or else (either as might be more or less advised by those seeking the info, or as could be bemusedly suspected by us) we’d be suspected of conducting fraud or terrorism, etc. So we have new dances to do (I may be more adept at this than my mother, who is of course tooled to older conventions, etc.) in terms of supplying addresses so that if anything is to be mailed to us, it is sent to the P.O. box, even if this means filling out blanks (which doesn’t always work, e.g., technically on computers) with the street address and the P.O. box together.

Tedious? Well, a fact of my life.

(My mother’s refusal to have a street box, as is so often the nature of her “ways,” has both an objective, sensible component and a subjective, less-than-reasonable component. One of her longstanding rationales was that punk kids could steal from and/or do damage to the mailbox, and this as a broad matter was far more likely and relevant a concern in the 1970s, and has very rarely happened in decades since. But wouldn’t you know? In the way that if you harbor fears long enough, eventually your fear will have some basis [though I don’t think she focused on it this way], as recently as March 2011 there was a crazy situation where a kid living on our street had no fewer than five college-kid beer-and-drugs parties in one week, each on a different night, and on one night, there was a rampage of boys on the street where a neighbor’s mailbox was damaged, and a partier’s car had its mirrors smashed off and the driver was chased across several lots and in a panic away from the area. My mother, awoken from sleep, called the police, not fully cognizant of all the facts of this mayhem at the time. We haven’t seen that kind of punkish insanity in this neighborhood since the 1970s. Fortunately, the household from which it emanated hasn’t hosted that kind of stuff since.

Let me add, this mailing-address thing isn’t the worst disservice [summarily speaking] that my mother’s “preferences” have done me; there are other, far more troubling examples, which I decisively hold off on telling in my blogs. By the way, a recently released memoir by Brooke Shields, on which I saw something of a review in the November 18 Star-Ledger, is interesting, showing in a way that people are ready enough to accept when it comes from a star, and otherwise is a foreign country most people don’t know about or try to understand: when you as a child are [as one type of problem] “codependent” with a parent [not exactly the case of me with my mother, but more Shields’ case], or operate in a “parentified role” [more my case], you actually are always inhabiting two different roles, with their own spheres of moral guidelines and emotional concerns, and the disjunction of which spheres provides sources for deep conflict: one that is more ordinarily defined with respect to your parent [where, due to problems apart from the two-role situation, you may be oppressed or abused in some way]; and one outside your parent’s sphere of business and concerns, and “looking in,” which is more morally grounded but also is troubling for putting you, the child, at odds in key ways with the parent.)

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And I found from a printout in my ACA files from when I first applied on the ACA Web site that they did have my P.O. box address—in fact, it was the only address that showed on the printout. But bless the “system’s” heart, between my applying and the feds getting the federal Marketplace-inserted info to the state to be processed there, somehow things got handled so that the mailing address used for the Medicaid card was the street address. And apparently the card was mailed out and returned to sender. And then ended up in Oblivion.

Well, the woman I talked with on November 12 was very helpful—she was (as I said) in a Medicaid office in Paterson. She first had to check with someone else if they could change the address per my request on the phone, or per whatever concern…and yes, they could. I should call back in 48 hours to confirm the change was made. Then I would get everything mailed to me.

I had a set of notes from various things the woman told me, a somewhat initially-incoherent-to-me jumble of stuff she mostly programmatically issued, and I sorted it out later, because there were two additional (and toll-free) numbers I had to call.

On Thursday, November 13, I got a mailing from the Paterson Medicaid office of just a single photocopied sheet basically outlining the type of benefits I would be entitled to. It was better than nothing, but only slightly. (It said I had to get most forms of health care from a certain HMO that was set up for Medicaid recipients in the area. This wasn’t entirely pleasing.)

Then on Friday, November 14, two days after the key Wednesday call, I phoned the number I first called, again. Yes, my address was changed. Now…I found that I should call only one of the two toll-free numbers I’d been given on Wednesday. This I did, and I went through whatever minor hoops I had to there, and was told my stuff would come in the mail in seven to ten business days. (Which I later found could be as late as early December.)

Well, this was something of a relief. I would have my Medicaid card almost a full year after I had first started applying. I wouldn’t have to go on the federal Marketplace site again (though I keep getting e-mails from the Team, as if they still “feel” I have to continue with an application that wasn’t finished last year).

I relate all this, not feeling it’s the worst anyone ever experienced with this ACA signup, and knowing there are many, many stories that are worse. But for what it’s worth, I feel a little more confidence in the system. But let’s just say that, if the ACA people were looking for a rank-and-file consumer to do cheerleading for the system, I would not be their first choice.


III. Maybe it ain’t over till the jackass-automaton Marketplace e-mailing genie sings further

On Tuesday, November 18, I opted—not with full confidence—to act on one of the many Marketplace e-mails I’ve gotten from the Team on the federal level, and reset my password for the federal site (though, except for maybe something routine I might be required to do, I don’t foresee any business with it, now that I seem to be signed up for Medicaid, while the Team keeps sending me e-mails as if I still have to sign up).

I ran into problems pretty early—when in the process of resetting my password, there were three questions related to my past personal life that I had to answer to clarify I was who I was. Well, I thought I had the answers to, but one answer turned out to be wrong. (Factually, I didn’t know why at first, then [after looking in my paper records] I found out: one of the questions concerned my “boss” from my first job. I had spelled his name wrong this time; in the original application, it was right. Both spellings have five letters and should be pronounced the same. So I had the name, not the right spelling.)

I tried to go through the process again, and starting encountering more problems. I did not get an e-mail, as I got when first being required to reset my password. I started getting infuriated similar to when I was deeply angered by the ACA e-mail implications several weeks ago, as shown in my entry OFAD #6. I figure, rather than curse the “whole shidden mess” out in the toughest possible terms, time to take a break.

I will keep you posted if there are more weird developments.

Monday, November 10, 2014

Off the Scales*: Does this real news story need a punchline?

From The Star-Ledger, January 31, 2009, p. 18 (no byline):
 

Court issues mixed ruling on mail-order lawsuit

A state appeals court yesterday upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by a Bergen County man who claimed a mail-order product he purchased promising penis enlargement violates the state’s Consumer Fraud Act.

The three appellate judges agreed with a trial court judge who dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the man, Englewood attorney [name redacted], failed to prove he suffered any “ascertainable loss.”

But the appeals court said the trial court erred in dismissing the suit without allowing [attorney/plaintiff surname] to offer such proof in an amended filing.

[Attorney/plaintiff surname] filed the lawsuit, for which he sought class-action status, in November 2007, six days after ordering the product, Herculex, from the mail-order health food supplier, Hampshire Labs Inc. The appeals court decision noted [attorney/plaintiff surname] apparently filed his lawsuit based on the ingredients of the topical ointment with no indication that he ever tried the product.

[Attorney/plaintiff surname] said he intends to file an amended lawsuit.

[end of story]

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Do we need a punchline?

A Google search does not show the attorney ever filed an amended complaint.

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* “Off the Scales” is an occasional series, usually with entries appearing as “sidebar” features within larger entries on other topics, which I first announced within this entry, as Off the Scales: A comment series on excesses in the U.S. legal profession. This occasional series is not meant to imply that I am an attorney, which I am not; it is meant in part for entertainment and is dedicated to the proposition that “I don’t claim that any jackass can practice law, but that there are some things done within the legal-professional realm that even a jackass like me can do for himself, in pro se fashion.”