Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 772
May 21, 2016
The men I met on Christian Mingle: I dated the married, lonely and confused
(Credit: Shutterstock/Salon)
“Meet me at McDonalds. I have something to tell you.” When Patrick suddenly sent me this text, I knew it couldn’t be a good thing. Just three weeks before, I found his profile on the punchline of all religious dating sites, Christian Mingle. He was a divorced, non-smoking Catholic and Spanish-to-French translator in the textbook industry. Just over six feet tall, his credentials included photographs that were not blurry and taken by someone other than himself. He was handsome, wore glasses, was going slightly gray, and edged a little on the nerdy side: perfect.
I was a 33-year-old Lutheran deacon-in-training trying to convince myself I didn’t want to have sex with him, even though I did. A pastor’s daughter, my upbringing included the strict moral code of “no sex before marriage.” This code was promptly discarded in my teenage years, when I learned, all too painfully, why my parents had tried to protect me from being prematurely thrust into the turmoil of physical intimacy. In my late twenties, my live-in boyfriend dumped me and kicked me out of his apartment. I was convinced that God was keeping a tally of my sexual indiscretions and punishing me for them. Though I knew it would be hard, I vowed to live more chastely, determined to curb any libidinous activity until I was at least in a solid relationship with a decent Christian man.
On our first date, Patrick suggested we take a Sunday afternoon walk on the Highline after our respective church services. As I climbed the last of the steps to the top of the old train platform, I recognized him right away. He looked exactly like his photos and he hadn’t lied about his height; he was at least three inches taller than me, making him truly 6’1”. For a tall girl like me, heaven. Our walk along the Highline took on the flavor of a stroll on the Champs-Élysées. He taught me some French phrases and I tried to impress him with the few words I already knew. I sounded as if I were reading off the menu from Le Pain Quotidian, but he humored me with applause. “You’re accent is superb,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said, flattered. As we walked, he opened up, admitting that he occasionally still worked with his ex-wife, whom he met while studying in Mexico City. I imagined a sun-bronzed goddess in an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse. I pictured them sitting together at a desk, poring over social science proofs and speaking secret words to each other.
“When was your divorce finalized?” I asked him suddenly.
“It’s been a year,” he said, and steered me with his hand to a bench, brushing away dead leaves. That’s when I noticed a small, plastic ring he was wearing on his pinky finger, on an otherwise ringless left hand.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“Oh, that.” He played with the ring, turning it on his finger. “That’s a little promise I made between me and God. After the divorce I bought this ring in a junk shop, and told God that I wouldn’t take it off until I found the right woman.” I wanted to reach out, hug him, and tell him I understood. I knew how hard it was to be outside of a pair, especially in our faith. The people who wrote the Bible never expected modern Christians to stay single so long, or get divorced, for that matter.
We agreed to meet again a few nights later, and took a walk around his neighborhood in Washington Heights. The sun was just dipping below the horizon when we arrived at his church, Mother Cabrini on Fort Washington Avenue. We made out on the lawn in front of the building that held Mother Cabrini’s relics, and I couldn’t help but think that she might be able to see us – she is a saint after all – and it felt dirty and thrilling all at once.
“Hmm, you smell like cigarettes,” I said between smooches.
“Sorry,” he said, wiping his lips. “I have one occasionally. A habit I picked up in Paris.” I shrugged it off, but he had claimed to be a non-smoker, and the lie bothered me.
“Let me make you dinner,” I said. “At your place.” I was falling for him, and I could tell he knew it. He hesitated.
“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t do that yet.”
“What, have dinner?” I asked. But I knew he would expect more. And so would I, in spite of myself. I had been alone for a long time and I was looking to intertwine limbs with someone soon. He brushed his hair back, and I noticed the ring on his pinky was missing. “What happened to your ring?” I asked.
“Oh, right,” he said. “I was typing this morning and it flew off my hand and landed in the radiator. Can you believe that?” he laughed. I couldn’t.
It wasn’t long before the dreaded text message came. I asked myself, “What blouse do you wear to an awkward conversation?” I picked a powder blue shade the color of the Virgin Mary’s robes. Standing at the McDonald’s counter, Patrick looked like a sad puppy in a windbreaker. He bought me a McFrappe to soften the blow I knew was coming. We sat at a booth face to face.
“I ran into my ex-wife today,” he said.
“Where?” I asked.
“At our apartment.”
He admitted that he was still legally married. Insert all of the usual excuses here: he didn’t love her, she didn’t understand him. Who knew what was true? All I did know was that this wasn’t the first time I’d been a nice Christian guy’s side-piece. And I was furious. But before going all Jodi Arias on him, I swung out of the booth and walked out with some of my pride intact.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. During my tenure on Christian Mingle, I didn’t meet any saintly superheroes, just normal guys with lots of problems: a mega-church lay leader who confessed to me that years ago, he’d done porn; a pilot who quoted scripture as much as he prompted me for chat-window sex; an entrepreneur who confessed that he was horrified after being “tricked” into falling for a transgender woman. There were plenty of homophobes, and men who felt women should be strictly under their patriarchal domain. I thought to myself, “Where is the Christian in this mingle?”
Then I thought about my own fraudulent Christian Mingle profile, and how it was less true than I would like it to be. I hardly lived up to my claims of virtue, never admitting to cheating on my college boyfriend, or having an affair with a married man in my early twenties, or frequently refusing to give people change in the subway. If my profile had been anywhere near honest, it would have read, “I’m an emotional eater with self-righteous tendencies who has never even owned a proper pair of running shoes and has frequent sex dreams about my eighth grade math teacher.”
Patrick texted me the next day, begging me to allow him to explain why he did what he did. I thought about ignoring him, but decided to meet him in spite of the advice of my therapist, who told me to stay away. I figured this was the most authentic act of faith: to listen and forgive.
We met at a nicer restaurant across the street from the McDonald’s. He told me a long and perilous story about his bad marriage, his parents’ neglect. I didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t, but I listened. Patrick’s profile might have read “Married lonely guy looking for someone to talk to.” I doubt I would have liked him as much if I’d never gotten the opportunity to listen to him open up and tell the truth.
We hugged before we parted, and I didn’t hear anything from him again until the following Easter, almost a year later. “Just wanted to tell you I hope all is well with you. Happy Easter. God bless.” This time I didn’t reply to his text message. But I did say a brief prayer of thanks that my pride, and my faith in men, had once again been resurrected.
The politics of words: Elitist liberals must stop mocking the simple language of Donald Trump
Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters/Brendan McDermid)
On Nov. 6, the night before the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush stood before a crowd in Arkansas and declared, “They misunderestimated me.”
Indeed, they had. In Emmett Rensin’s evisceration of smug liberalism, he describes how the media openly speculated whether Bush was up to the mental challenge of a one-on-one debate beginning when he ran for governor of Texas in 1994 and in every political contest thereafter.
Bush delivered so many “idiotic” quotes they became their own class of expressions: Bushisms. Bushisms from his 2000 election campaign include, “Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?” and “Reading is the basics for all learning.”
Bush fulfilled the liberal stereotype of the “dumbass hick” in part because he didn’t “talk right,” Rensin argues. Indeed, had Bush truly been as stupid as many liberals believed, he would have been unable to pardon a turkey, much less govern the country. Viewed in another light, Bush was the Harvard-educated son of a president with his fair set of accomplishments – hardly a lightweight.
None of that mattered because he spoke funny. He was an “idiot.”
Not speaking right is an unforgiveable sin. The highly educated, which tend also be the highly liberal, believe the way they speak is the only intelligent way to speak. One must understand syntax and the parts of speech, and have waded through dense academic texts to learn the appropriate use of pretentious jargon such as utilize, phenomenon, categorize, all very effective at dressing up arguments and making them seem more scientific.
Scientists, lawyers, and those in highly specialized fields must use technical and complex language. Politicians like Bush (and Donald Trump, also scorned for his language) do not.
That words can be considered “smart” or “dumb” at all is built on a view of literacy as connected to formal schooling. The English taught in an English literature class is the correct English, any slang or other way of speaking is incorrect.
This goes beyond being merely snobbish to being classist. Neither does it acknowledge how racist and sexist is our use of language. The best English is the English of educated white men. Many have argued black children need to learn to switch from Black English to “Standard American English” (read: white English) to do better at school. So-called ‘masculine’ speech patterns show intelligence and assertiveness, while ‘feminine’ speech patterns are something for women to overcome so they can show how intelligent they truly are.
Linguistic intelligence is considered the best kind of intelligence – or, indeed, the only kind of intelligence. Pity the successful plumber at a dinner party of academics – he may have mechanical skills and be intelligent enough to navigate the complex world of business, but if he cannot eloquently discuss the feminist implications of Beyoncé’s “Lemonade,” he may be written off as somewhat dim.
In America, language is a barrier between the highly educated and the less educated. Just as a unilingual English speaker is unlikely to stick around for a conversation conducted in German, so too are those who don’t understand educated, upper-class elites unlikely to stick around for a conversation in their vernacular.
Throughout history, the educated elites have even stronger language barriers. In medieval Europe, literate priests wielded power and controlled what the illiterate peasants learned and believed. In aristocratic Russia, the nobility spoke French, while peasants spoke English. Eventually, these class divisions were impossible to maintain.
Yet, the attitude justifying such divisions remains. In politics, advocating the use of simple, straightforward language is met with the cry that you are “dumbing down” political discourse. It is telling the argument is not that simple language misrepresents ideas; rather, it is just dumb. Simple is stupid, complicated is intelligent, and it is the audience’s fault if they are too dumb to understand.
This attitude is smug and counter-productive. Using simple language is not “dumbing down” political discourse. It is understanding that being understood is more important than using sophisticated language.
Good orators like Martin Luther King Jr. and Bill Clinton show how powerful ideas can be expressed in simple terms. Clinton excels at describing thorny economic and political concepts in ways that resonate with wide audiences. King’s “I have a dream” was the rallying cry of an intelligent and radical idea to end segregation and live in a world free of racism.
I can imagine someone countering that the problem Bushisms was not that the language was simple, but that it defied all rules of grammar and syntax, which it undoubtedly did. But is this truly a problem?
In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell argued it wasn’t. He claimed the defense of the English language had “nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear….”
Politicians need to make their meaning clear to many people, which is possible even with Bush’s garbled syntax, Donald Trump’s sentence fragments, and Sarah Palin’s run-on sentences. Trump, in fact, is very good at using emotional language to clearly communicate his messages.
As sociologist Neil Gross recently wrote, part of the reason for Trump’s appeal with working-class voters is that he does not use the language of the highly educated. Rather, he mocks that language, exploiting class resentments.
This is the danger of using language to lock large swaths of society out of political discourse. It leaves them vulnerable to the populist rhetoric of a demagogue like Trump, who speaks a language people understand. The educated liberals steering the Democratic Party would do well to stop scorning simple language and start embracing it.
The Nazi hunters who wouldn’t give up: “Many war criminals… simply went back and resumed their lives”
Simon Wiesenthal displays two pictures, which he says refer to Nazi criminal Walter Rauff, May 31, 1973. (Credit: AP)
Detailed, dramatic, and at times gripping, Adam Nagorski’s “The Nazi Hunters” looks at about a dozen men and women who kept pushing at a time when the world was trying to move on. Hunters like Simon Wiesenthal and Serge and Ben Klarsfeld are characters here, as are Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess, “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele, “Bitch of Buchenwald” Ilse Koch, and the notorious Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann.
Much of the book chronicles various hunts and tells the stories of those who led them. But it also considers the larger moral issues around the effort: Were these hunters motivated by vengeance? What could be gained by arresting rickety old camp guards, decades later? How much were the villains responsible for their actions?
We spoke to Nagorski, who worked as Newsweek’s bureau chief in Hong Kong and several European capitals, from New York, where he was touring behind the book. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
In “The Nazi Hunters,” you look at more than a dozen of these people. What did you find that they shared in common, if anything?
I thought a lot about that in the process. Obviously, all had a real zeal to keep this issue alive at a time when so many countries wanted to just put it behind them—of course the Germans and Austrians, but also the United States, Britain, even the Soviet Union to a large extent. Two personal qualities really struck me.
Each one had incredible determination. Someone like Ben Ferencz, who wouldn’t take no for an answer when they came up with this evidence, all the documentation on the Einsatzgruppen, the special killing squads in the east. Even with Telford Taylor saying, “We do not have the resources to hold another Nuremberg trial, and I don’t even have an experienced prosecutor.” And he’s a 27-year-old Harvard Law graduate and says, “I’ll do it.” And he conducts the biggest murder trial in history.
And they have what’s called chutzpah, whether they were Jewish or not. Beate Klarsfeld, the German part of the German-French couple in France and Germany, made it her mission to identify and demand the trial of SS officers who had been responsible for Jews from France. When no one seemed to be listening to her protests, especially in the ‘60s, when there was briefly a German chancellor by the name of Kiesinger who had been a Nazi and who had served the regime, she was so incensed by the lack of response that she got herself a press pass, went to a party convention, and then pretended to be passing behind the stage and walked right up to Kiesinger and gave him a slap across the face and shouted, “Nazi! Nazi!” This is the same year that Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated—she could have been killed.
These were people who had very strong personalities. Sometimes they even had conflicts among themselves about strategy and methods, and they worked independently often. Whether they were government prosecutors, investigators, or private citizens who had just made it their cause, I think those two qualities stand out to me.
Given that they have certain things in common, was there a character here you found especially fascinating or inspiring?
Well there are several, but I’ve already mentioned Benjamin Ferencz, who is still alive. He’s 96 years old. He’s about 5 foot tall and just continues to be incredibly passionate about his cause.
Fritz Bauer is a very interesting character who’s only been rediscovered in Germany in the last few years. When I started this project, very few people knew about him. Now more do, because there have been some biographies and films about him. He was a Social Democrat from a secular Jewish family and was first prosecuted by the Nazis because he was a Social Democrat, not because he was Jewish. He fled and was in Denmark and Sweden during the war and then came back from exile. In the early ‘50s, when the Cold War had set in and no one wanted to fight these cases nor even talk about them, he was just determined to find ways to make the Germans confront their past.
The United States and Britain were more concerned with the Soviet Union. We were trying to put this stuff behind us, and West Germany was an ally at this point.
Yes, West Germany was an ally. We wanted people to not antagonize the Germans at this point. I talked to a man who had been in charge of the first CIA base in Berlin after the war. He was from a German-Jewish family and had gotten out as a boy in the ‘30s and eventually ended up in the United States. He joined the army and the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, and then joined the CIA and becomes the head of this base. I asked him about his attitude towards Nazis at that point when the Cold War set in and he said, “None of us were interested in fighting the last war. What we had to do was done in Nuremberg and the Dachau trials, and now we had two urgent concerns: Russians snatching scientists and trying to maintain support in West Germany for the cause of the Western Alliance.”
People forget how quickly this was put on the back burner. Even Israel, after it was created, was not necessarily in the business of hunting Nazis. That’s one of the great myths, that there were Israeli Nazi hunters everywhere. Eventually there was the spectacular kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann, but that was much more the exception than the rule. They were concerned with securing their own existence, which was imperiled at every turn.
To what extent were the Nazi hunters motivated by vengeance, versus a sense of justice?
I think initially, of course there was a motivation of vengeance. Wiesenthal said his first instinct was, “Of course I want these guys to pay, who kept me in Mauthausen and other camps.” Another Holocaust survivor, Tuviah Friedman, who was also one of the early Nazi hunters, actually joined the Polish communist security police that was interrogating Germans and others. He said, “I’m not proud of it now, but I was not giving anyone the benefit of the doubt and I was working them over as vigorously as I could.”
U.S. troops liberating something like Dachau witnessed scenes, for instance, where prisoners were suddenly turning on their captors and sometimes beating them to death. They would often look away, feeling not only I can’t stop them, but also, Do I want to stop them?
Part of the thing about the trials was that the notion was that this was not going to be vengeance. First of all, you owe it to the victims to put some people on trial, but also, you owe it to history and to our understanding of history to put it on the record. Because our understanding of genocide, of the Holocaust, of the horrors of World War II, is, to a large extent, the product of these efforts of the Nazi trials, a few of which continue today. Without that, I think the tendency, certainly within Germany and Austria, was to say, “Oh, it was a war. Bad things always happen in a war.” At the end of most wars, the victors might execute a bunch of the vanquished and pillage and rape and so forth, and then that would be over.
But here it was to establish some international norms, to show that this was no ordinary war, that to say you were just following orders was not acceptable, and in fact, in some ways condemned you. Because you clearly knew that these were orders that defied every notion of human rights and international norms. So it set knew principles. Now, whether we have lived up to those principles or not is a different matter, but it was unprecedented, what happened.
Jan Sehn is one of the interesting characters who is totally unknown in the West and even in Poland, I found. He was the investigator right after the war who conducted all of the interrogations of Auschwitz personnel and some of the other concentration camps, including the commandant of the small concentration camp that’s featured in “Schindler’s List” — Amon Goeth — and Rudolf Hoess, the longest serving commandant of Auschwitz. [Sehn] was, as the Polish interrogator, now representing a Polish communist government—in other words, a Stalinist government. He was not a Stalinist by a long shot, but he was representing them. He could have just gotten a short statement and had them hanged, but instead, he worked, especially with Hoess, to get his whole story: everything about how he helped create this horror of a camp and how it functioned and his psychology. It resulted in what became his autobiography after he was hanged.
It’s one of the most chilling records of the Holocaust I think we have, and it’s largely forgotten, but not by other Nazi hunters. For instance, Gabriel Bach, the last surviving member of the prosecution team of Eichmann in Israel, told me that before he saw Eichmann for the first time, he was sitting outside his prison cell reading this autobiography. I think what someone like Jan Sehn was doing, he realized it was his responsibility, before these people were put away or executed, to get the record so that there’s no dispute.
Jan Sehn’s name appears on almost every testimony of living Auschwitz personnel, which are now in the archives of the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the Polish archives. He cooperates with Fritz Bauer in Germany, who is German-Jewish—Jan Sehn, incidentally is from a Polish family of German Christian descent. They cooperate across the Iron Curtain in assembling the information that is the basis for the Auschwitz trials that take place in Germany in the ‘60s, that in turn spark this whole movement in Germany of the ‘60s generation, who would turn on their parents and say, “What did you do during the war?” and “We have to break the silence on this.” At that time, Poland and West Germany didn’t even have diplomatic relations. These two men, of very different backgrounds, but driven by the same motives, managed to pull this off.
Some of these characters on both sides, Eichmann and Wiesenthal for instance, are sort of cinematic, larger-than-life characters. But how much of the process that you recount here really resembled a movie?
“The Boys from Brazil” and “Marathon Man,” were great movies, great fun, enthralling—they have very little to do with reality. I mean, it is true that the whole hunt for Eichmann and the actual operation that Mossad pulled off, which is fascinating—by the way, it was prompted from a tip by Fritz Bauer, a West German prosecutor who doesn’t trust his own government enough to give them that information and gives it to the Israelis—that is drama, which is high drama.
But it’s also true that aside from some of these really top Nazi criminals who feel they need to flee Europe and hide elsewhere—Klaus Barbie, Josef Mengele, those kinds of people—there are many, many war criminals who simply went back and resumed their lives, often taking ordinary jobs, some in the civil service. That was true in both East Germany and West Germany, even though the Soviet side always claimed that all the war criminals were in West Germany.
The best way in East Germany to prove your loyalty to the new regime, if you had been a Nazi party member or a member of the Gestapo, was to serve the new regime and join the Communist Party or the Stasi, the secret police. It was overdramatized in many cases. I think it was Beate Klarsfeld who proved the fact of how many of these people were living out in the open. The way she found one of the key people she was looking for, a Gestapo officer in France, was she called information in Cologne. In effect, he was in the Cologne phone book. You didn’t have to go to South America for that.
Even though the mythology is exaggerated, Wiesenthal sort of understood the power of publicity. He liked the fact that someone like Josef Mengele who managed to elude the authorities. Now recent letter and diaries indicate that he was really fearful that the Israelis were on his trail all the time, when in fact they made some attempts but then gave up on that because they had other priorities. The fact that he felt hounded and felt it necessary to live in very shabby conditions not to attract attention to himself, maybe there’s a little poetic justice in that, even though he drowned—it looked like he had a heart attack while swimming in Brazil.
Transit agency settles excessive-force lawsuit with woman
OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Bay Area Rapid Transit agreed to pay a San Francisco woman $1.35 million to settle a lawsuit alleging a transit officer broke bones in her face and left her bloody and unconscious.
BART says in a statement it settled the lawsuit earlier this month and accepted full responsibility for the injuries Megan Sheehan received after an officer slammed her face-first onto the floor, the East Bay Times reported Saturday (http://bit.ly/1RfVWm8).
Sheehan filed the lawsuit last year following her St. Patrick’s Day arrest in 2014 at the Lake Merritt BART station in downtown Oakland.
BART police said at the time that Sheehan was drunk and argumentative with officers who found her on a bench inside the station. Officers arrested her on suspicion of public intoxication and resisting arrest.
Sheehan’s complaint accused an officer of violently beating her. In a surveillance video of the incident, an officer can be seen grabbing her hand and pulling it around her back, followed by her being forced quickly to the ground and the sound of a loud thwack. Sheehan is then seen lying in a pool of her own blood, face down.
BART officials said in a statement the agency was committed to reform and ensuring such incidents don’t happen in the future.
“Over the past six years, the BART Police Department has undergone tremendous organizational change and has worked tirelessly to reshape and reform its approach to training and policing to better meet the needs of the communities BART serves,” the statement reads.
They say an internal investigation was put on hold when the lawsuit was filed, pending the outcome of the lawsuit. That investigation will now resume, and officials said “action that is deemed appropriate” would be taken at the conclusion of the investigation.
No kidding: Exaggerator beats Nyquist in Preakness
BALTIMORE (AP) — Finally, Exaggerator has beaten Nyquist, and it came in the Preakness on Saturday to end any chance of another Triple Crown.
Seizing the lead at the top of the stretch, Exaggerator splashed past a tiring Nyquist and went on for a 3 1/2-length victory over Cherry Wine on a rain-drenched Pimlico Race Course.
Exaggerator’s elusive victory over his nemesis came after four tough losses, including a runner-up finish to Nyquist in the Kentucky Derby.
Nyquist was sent off as the 3-5 favorite in the 11-horse field, and dueled with Uncle Lino for the lead through the first mile of the 1 3/16th-mile second leg of the Triple Crown.
And then it was all Exaggerator — no kidding.
The 3-year-old colt kept gaining ground along the rail. Jockey Kent Desormeaux saw an opening around the final turn, angled outside and Exaggerator took over.
Nyquist, with Mario Gutierrez aboard finished third, followed by Stradivari, Lani, Laoban, Uncle Lino, Fellowship, Awesome Speed, Collected and Abiding Star.
Winning time for the race was 1:58.31.
Trained by Kent’s younger brother, Keith, Exaggerator showed his talent in the slop once again. He won the Santa Anita Derby over a sloppy track, and did the same in the Preakness. It was the first Preakness winner for the trainer who began his career in Maryland, and third for the Hall of Fame rider.
The crowd was estimated at a record 134,000.
Hinchcliffe takes top seed in Indy qualifying with late push
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — James Hinchcliffe posted the fastest four-lap average in Indianapolis 500 qualifying Saturday to take the top seed into the pole shootout Sunday.
The Canadian driver for Schmidt Peterson Motorsports hung on after moving past three-time race winner Helio Castroneves in the final 40 minutes. Hinchcliffe finished at 230.946 mph.
Ryan Hunter-Reay, the 2014 Indy winner, moved into second on the second-to-last run of the day at 230.805. Team Penske’s Will Power was third at 230.736, and Castroneves fourth at 230.500.
All 33 starting positions will be set Sunday. The nine fastest from Saturday advanced to the shootout.
Weather changes made for a wild day on the 2.5-mile oval, with the lead switching hands twice in the final 45 minutes and bumping for the shootout taking place until the session’s final run.
Lady Gaga’s childhood piano doesn’t sell at auction
NEW YORK (AP) — Lady Gaga’s childhood piano, which she used to write her first song at age 5, didn’t hit a note at an auction in New York.
The upright piano failed to meet its reserve price Saturday when Los Angeles-based Julien’s Auctions offered it as part of the “Music Icons” memorabilia sale at the Hard Rock Cafe New York.
The piano had a pre-sale estimate of $100,000 to $200,000.
A spokeswoman for the auction house wouldn’t disclose the reserve, the lowest price a seller will accept for an item. It wasn’t immediately clear if the piano would be offered for sale again.
More than 85 Elvis Presley items also were auctioned by Julien’s. They included a 1969 Gibson Dove guitar that Presley’s father made for him. It sold for $334,000.
Harper says his jersey being auctioned is not as advertised
MIAMI (AP) — An auction house says it is offering the jersey Bryce Harper wore during his memorable dugout fight with a teammate. The Washington Nationals star says they’ve got the wrong shirt.
“That’s my MVP jersey, and I have it,” Harper said Saturday.
The website Lelands.com says it’s taking bids for the jersey the reigning NL MVP wore during his fight last September with closer Jonathan Papelbon, who drew a four-game suspension for grabbing Harper by the throat.
As of Saturday evening the website said there had been six bids, with a top offer of about $4,800.
“I hope it goes to some good,” Harper said.
The Nationals slugger said he had nothing to do with the auction, and doesn’t know who’s behind it or how Leland’s obtained one of his jerseys. But he’s annoyed about the situation.
“I don’t think it’s right,” he said, speaking before the Nationals’ game at Miami.
Leland, based in Bohemia, New York didn’t return calls from the AP seeking comment.
“Presented here is the very same home white #34 jersey Harper wore during the altercation,” the Leland listing says.
Harper said he wore the same jersey in every game last season, and marked it with stitching near the hem.
“That way, every day that I wore my jersey, I knew that it was my jersey,” he said. “Superstitiously I wear the same one.”
Harper still has that 2015 jersey at home, he said. He said he has a new jersey this season that he also marked with stitching and wears in every game.
A person familiar with the situation said Harper often wears two jerseys over the course of a game, including his lucky one. The person discussed the matter with the AP on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.
The person said Harper will wear two jerseys on days when one of them is being collected for authentication and distribution. But he’ll wear the jersey being authenticated in the early innings, and then switch to the lucky jersey he wears throughout the season.
That would suggest he was likely wearing his lucky jersey — the one he still has — during the fight with Papelbon, because it occurred in the eighth inning.
Tampa Bay CF Kiermaier breaks hand trying to make catch
DETROIT (AP) — Tampa Bay Rays center fielder Kevin Kiermaier has broken his left hand trying to make a catch.
Kiermaier was hurt in the fifth inning of Saturday’s game at Detroit. He broke his glove hand and will be evaluated again on Monday to see how long he might be sidelined.
Kiermaier, one of the top defensive outfielders in the majors, made a diving attempt to catch James McCann’s shallow flyball, but he was unable to make the play. He then immediately headed back to the dugout, holding his left arm around the wrist area.
The 26-year-old Kiermaier came into Saturday’s game hitting .240 with five home runs and 16 RBIs.
Desmond Jennings replaced Kiermaier in center field.
The Latest: Man shot outside White House remains critical
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on the shooting of a man outside the White House (all times local):
5:30 p.m.
A hospital spokeswoman says the gunman shot by a U.S. Secret Service officer outside the White House remains in critical condition.
George Washington University Hospital spokeswoman Susan Griffiths provided the update Saturday evening about the man investigators have identified as Jesse Oliveri of Ashland, Pennsylvania.
Secret Service spokesman Robert Hoback declined to comment Saturday on the case, citing the continuing investigation.
Another Secret Service spokesman, David Iacovetti, said Friday that one of the agency’s officers fired one shot at the man Friday afternoon after he approached a checkpoint and refused repeated commands to drop his weapon.
The Secret Service said the gunman never made it inside the White House complex, and no one else was injured
