Tangiers, Morocco

You'll want to picture this with a full-sized film crew on it. Plus rollcarts, taco carts, film cases, cables, cameras, dolly tracks, wardrobe racks, lights, C-stands, actors, extras and stunt people -- because, of course, these are chase scenes. Got that? Now add the helicopter -- it's going whooka-whooka-whooka overhead. Now imagine all the people who shop here every day -- which is to say most of Tangiers -- have heard there are movie stars in these streets. Good so far? Then ask yourself how it would be if all those nice people were in the middle of their Ramadan holy days and could not eat, drink or smoke from sunup to sunset -- they're a little edgy. Finally set the whole thing, plus our trucks and vans, around the most inadequate traffic circle you've every seen, with a mosque in the middle of it that must be prayed at several times a day.

Call the temperature, say, 95.

That's what it's been like shooting in Morocco.

Joyeux Anniversaire

So yesterday was my birthday. We called my mother's latest the Unspeakable Birthday, and I'm calling mine the Inadmissible Birthday. The number is far too large, far too different from those that have gone before. I am far too large, far too different from what has gone before. Some time this year my good looks, whatever there were of them, left me, and I am no longer a person to whom people say You don't look that old! and I'd never have guessed! I have begun to look my age and I know it, can see it when I wake up in the morning and when a really artful application of makeup results in looking not good, but merely not bad.

So this is not a happy birthday, even in Paris, France, and I was not pleased to greet it. Though I also did not anticipate how very unhappy it would make me.

I wake up late in London. Bother! I actually think, wondering again why London makes my brain extemporize as Winnie-the-Pooh. No time to shower so I throw two days' clothes into a bag and run to St. Pancras to catch my train.

I am early enough to allow time for a cup of tea-to-go and, though it is hard to juggle together with my purse, my 20-pound computer/briefcase and an overnight bag while also fishing for tickets and passport, today it seems worth it. But as I try to manhandle the whole mess through the ticket stile I am told by Security that I can't take the tea. There are no trashcans in sight and I am given to understand that England does not do the trashcan thing for security reasons. This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard, but with no other option I leave the cup of tea in the middle of the floor, incensed already and feeling grimier by the moment.

I arrive in Paris to discover temperatures 20 degrees warmer and hot sunshine spilling over the city. Now I am sweaty as well as incensed and grimy and proceed to the Intercontinental Le Grand Hotel, which is what I suppose the culturally sensitive would call "venerable" and what I'll simply say is old. In typical French fashion lots of energy has been expended upon appearance and very little upon convenience. The air conditioning is sluggish, the bathroom Motel 6-sized, the bedroom small and oppressive, and I'd cheerfully trade the Degas prints in their gilded frames for a working chest of drawers.

I sit down to check my e-mail for something from the actress I'm here to work with and come across a birthday card from a dear friend. It is one of those funny commentaries on aging and it makes me burst into tears, which is not good because the desk sits in front of a large mirror and all I can see is that I am old, sweaty, grimy, greasy, and incensed, plus now blotchy, swollen, red and gimlet-eyed.

There is only one thing to do and I go do it: Walk up the street to Galleries Lafayette -- enormous designer department store -- and search for the hair salon I know must be there somewhere, which it is. I ascertain they can find someone to see me today and perch in a chair before a mirror, wishing I had some mascara with me. A person comes by and asks what it is I think I'd like. In my inadequate schoolgirl French I blurt out what I think at the time is "I am 50 today and old," (and what further reflection will tell me was actually "I am 15 today and pregnant") and, upon being offered a cautious, "Joyeux Anniversaire?" promptly burst into tears again. For a wonder, they find a stylist who will consent to see me anyway after about 20 minutes (no doubt passing the buck amongst themselves desperately in corners -- I'm not doing the nutcase! You do her!).

I tell Philippe, the stylist, to change my hair, and I say nothing else for the next 5 hours and $400. I cry again once, and twice I fall asleep, but I offer no direction of any kind. They cut, razor, color, highlight, cut again . . . I say nothing. This is a curiously restful fatalism, I find, and while it makes the staff rather nervous, I enjoy the novel experience of totally sincere passivity.

Finally, they are finished -- or maybe it is just that the store is closing -- and I leave with a lot less hair and money and repair to a sidewalk cafe for indifferent chicken and good wine, followed by an evening of "Entourage" reruns on my computer.

That was my 50th.

Many things have happened between yesterday and last time I blogged, all of which are more interesting and more entertaining than this account of my birthday, but, you know, I figure it's my birthday and my blog, and if you can't have a senseless, indulgent self-pity party here, where can you?

. . . Well, apparently at the Galleries Lafayette, but that's neither here nor there.

Going to the Polo

So yesterday afternoon I took a couple of trains out to Windsor to the home of an actress friend to spend an evening gabbing and doing my laundry. It rained, of course, but it was a pleasant, easy trip and I arrived only a little damp. My friend had a must-do event to attend that day -- polo in the Royal Box, she said, which made me giggle -- but expected to be home early in the evening. Fine. Her lovely nanny was at the house and we were having tea and feeding the washer around 7 when the phone rang: My friend was still at the event. "You have to come," she said. "The Prince of Wales is here and lots of great people. I'll send my driver."

I consider: I am wearing my oldest, frayed green cargo pants, sneakers, an oversized fluorescent orange t-shirt and a raincoat. I have no makeup on and my unwashed hair is caught up in a bun with a $2 hairclip. My ensemble is entirely in keeping with an evening of tea and laundry and wholly inappropriate for post-polo parties with a prince.

No, I say, I really couldn't. Thanks so much, but have a good time -- I'll just finish my laundry and see you next week.

No, she says, you will come. I will not, I say -- you have no idea what I am wearing, but it is not good. This does not matter, she says, I will be fine. I chuckle and demur. She says please, please. I apologize. She insists. I refuse. She says go find something in my closet, the driver is on his way. I protest that the only thing I could fit in from her closet would be the laundry bag, but she has already hung up.

Now, movie stars, some of them, have a certain irresistible charm. It's why we're drawn to them. We think it's because they're famous, and sometimes it is, but often they are famous because the charm is of such overwhelming wattage it makes everyone near them seem to be standing under a blown-out bulb. Thus did my protests come to feel feeble, shallow and silly, and I found myself pulling up on the manicured lawn of Guards Polo Club looking like Eliza Doolittle had she never encountered Henry Higgins.

I looked it up today and this is what the Internet had to say about the event I had witlessly blundered into:

"The Cartier International Polo is considered by many to be the highlight of the British social season. The pinnacle of the polo calendar, the tournament is a rare and coveted occasion where English society and royalty mix with Hollywood movie stars, global music icons and celebrities from around the world."

All of which was immediately clear to me as I stood in the drizzle outside a massive white tent surrounded by bucolic garden gates and guarded, to all appearances, by the British Secret Service. Lots of them. To a man, they refused to let me in.

"I don't blame you," I say, "I wouldn't let me in either. I mean, look at me . . ." This is the greatest charm offensive I have in my quiver at the moment and it is pathetically unequal to the occasion. Fortunately, my friend pops out at this point, dripping in diamonds, and firmly manhandles me past the men in black. I hold her hand while she chatters excitedly and I wait to be shot in the back. We enter an emptying tent and I say an affectionate hello to some friendly faces and toss back a flute of champagne she has thoughtfully and immediately handed me. Fortified by alcohol, we venture across the polo grounds for the prime event of the evening.

There are a number of marquees strung across the lawn like pearls (a cliche, but when it works, it works). We are headed to the one called Chinawhite.

"The Chinawhite enclosure through the day and night is now firmly established as the party of the summer."

Oh dear God.

We approach the VIP entrance, normally a slam-dunk in the right company -- and I am very much in the right company -- but this is a no-go. The gate guard takes one look at me and refuses point blank. My friend wheedles and bats her famous eyelashes to no avail, but in the end the proper authorities are appealed to and I find myself at "the party of the summer."

I have been to some parties and known some very beautiful people -- was in company with a few of them at the moment -- but the scene inside Chinawhite is different by an order of magnitude from the events I have been to. The people are uniformly stunning in designer clothes of butterfly colors. All heels are stiletto, all hair is perfectly cut, sparkling with the sorts of highlights that bespeak thousand-dollar colorists. There are scarves more beautiful than anything in my closet, and those are just the ones the men are wearing.

"These are the posh people," my friend whispers to me conspiratorially, and I am grateful she is not one of them, past the first couple of layers. Nearly everyone is young. Nearly everyone is gorgeous. If it weren't also true that nearly everyone is drunk I would simply have had to dig a hole in the pristine turf and pull the sod over me until it was over. But, as it is, I am either not noticed by or am beneath the notice of the assembled company so I am a little more comfortable than I had supposed I would be and settle in for an evening of serious people-watching.

Watching was about all I could do because there was no question of actually hearing anything besides the music and the hubbub. I believe that I met some actors, a designer or two, a couple of musicians and at least one billionaire -- most of them introduced to me by the sweetest viscount I have ever met -- also the only viscount I have ever met.

Afterward, we repaired to my friend's neighborhood pub for a nightcap, and I and my laundry took a taxi back to London.

It was a bizarre and wondrous evening, and I will say this for the posh people of Britain: There is a lot to like about people of such extraordinary self-possession and good manners that even while inebriated not a single person I met appeared to so much as glance at my atrocious, ridiculous attire.

I never saw Prince Charles, but class, I must say, was well-represented.

All the Amenities

I enter my hotel room every night like Inspector Clouseau looking for Cato. It comes to this when you've lived in a hotel room for an extended period. At first you feel charmed, pampered, cosseted. But after a while -- and not even a long while -- all that gives way to uglier emotions: territoriality, defensiveness, suspicion and, ultimately, full-blown paranoia. Your hotel room becomes less a refuge than a bunker, and every time you sortie out the enemy comes in and rearranges all your furniture.

The war between me and housekeeping started small. Every hotel's housekeeping staff has a certain way of doing and arranging things that is chipped into stone tablets somewhere in the basement. They do not take kindly to deviation and, though they will try to indulge you when you're new, after a few days they begin to expect you to get with the program.

The trouble is that you also have a way of arranging things, which includes using the available nooks and surfaces to work and live in. You and housekeeping are toiling in the same room with totally different agendas.

For example, housekeeping wants the desk in my room to be tidy, and in its precise middle they wish to display an elegant pink stationery box. I, on the other hand, wish my laptop to live in that spot, so I moved the stationery box to a handy shelf under the TV. This quirk they mutely acceded to with five-star politeness for about a week. Then one day I came home and there was the stationery box, back on the blotter. I moved it to the shelf. The next night it reappeared. I hid it in a drawer and was rewarded by its continued absence the next day. Two nights later it was back and I hid it in a different drawer. A loaded silence ensued.

Then, three days ago, I came home and found the contents of the desk drawer -- my change, receipts, pens and papers -- piled in the middle of the blotter. In the drawer instead was hotel writing paper, cards and breakfast hangers for the door -- the contents of the stationery box, sans box.

I considered, darkly, and finally locked the paper in my suitcase, defeating Housekeeping by the pyrrhic expedient of appearing to have stolen their stationery. It is not my imagination that they are looking smug these days, the Housekeeping women. I have proven myself the swine they knew me to be when I began screwing with their system. There has been no more stationery; I clearly cannot be trusted with it.

And then there are the slippers. They come in soft cotton bags, wittily staged on the scale in the bathroom. I removed the slippers to the closet with the complimentary bathrobes. (It's not that I don't appreciate the thought, it's just that I'd like to use the scale.) The next night more slippers arrived, neatly bagged and placed on the scale. Next time I weighed myself I moved them to the closet shelf. Do they think I am stealing the slippers, too? I wondered. So I put the bags of slippers out in the open on the bathtub surround. They ignored them and brought two more slippers, posed perfectly on the gleaming scale.

I have 20 slippers now and three weeks to go. I have taken to piling them in the bathtub. Now they think I am crazy as well as a thief.

So far, neither the slippers nor the stationery have appeared on my bill, though I was charged for something cryptically called a "Relief Pak." Upon inquiry I discovered that the contents of the little leather box in my bathroom containing ablutionary amenities are not complimentary and I had been charged 11 pounds 50 pence for availing myself. I assured the girl at the front desk I had no intention of paying $17 for three cotton pads and 4 Q-tips. Smoothly, she removed the charge.

But there was something in her eyes that told me I had not heard the last of the hotel's wrath. When I check out there are going to be 62 pairs of slippers on my bill, mark my words. One way or another, Cato always wins.

Cuppa Tea, Part 1: The States

The problem with traveling on business is the diabolical illusion that because you're staying in a hotel and eating in restaurants you can have whatever you want.

Say you roll out of bed and what you want is a little something to eat and a quick cup of tea. You open the room service menu and find something simple, and that's where it starts to get complicated.

Yogurt is $5, plus a $2 delivery charge. And an 18% gratuity. Also, for your convenience the receipt will provide a blank space for you to append "Additional Tip," thereby shaming you into appending an additional tip. So now you will be paying around $10 for a cup of yogurt, but, you think, for only $4 more at least you can add tea and feel ready to start your day.

Now, most people think you can get a cup of tea anywhere in the country just like you can get coffee, but this is not the case.

For instance, if you order a cup of tea in a hotel anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line at any time of day it will arrive cold and unsweetened with ice and lemon. According to Andrew Barr's "Drink: A Social History of America," 80% of the tea drunk in America is iced, but virtually all the tea drunk in the South.

So you specify hot tea and they won't usually have it, but if they do it will arrive with a slice of lemon even if you don't ask for it, and if you ask for sugar it will arrive with a packet of Equal.

If you have asked for milk they will bring you a giant glass of milk on the side, as no one in the South can imagine that anyone might want to pour milk into perfectly good tea, especially what with the lemon and all. But you can't tolerate the waste so you cannily specify a little milk for the tea. In this case they will bring you non-dairy creamer. You stand your ground and send that back, insisting on the real thing, and they will return -- I am not kidding -- with a tall glassful of half-and-half and wait with ill-concealed alarm for you to drink it.

At this point you might give up and get in your rental car and drive to that part of the nearest interstate which intersects the edge of town in a long, incandescent string of fast-food franchises followed by two gas stations, a fruit stand and 38 miles of Baptist churches, and find a Dunkin' Donuts and pull up and go in and order a by-God simple cup of tea. And they will smile and say, "Y'all have a good day, now," as they hand you your unsweetened iced tea with lemon.

And so it goes, with variations. On the West Coast it's easier to get crack cocaine than it is to get plain, ordinary, caffeinated, black tea. You can get Earl Grey, if you like the taste of boiled Chanel No. 5, or you can get herbal tea, or tea from fruits, or tea from crushed Chinese wildflowers or powdered South Pacific sea urchins. You can get it with steamed skim and cinnamon sticks and Indian spices and lumps of raw cane and drizzles of soy substitute, but West Coast restaurateurs will join hands and throw themselves into the burning pits of hell before they will give it to you with ordinary milk and plain white sugar, and that is just the way it is.

And as you pick up the phone to order your fifteen-dollar yogurt and cup of hot tea, wherever you are you understand with anticipatory exhaustion that probably you should just have that Fig Newton left over from yesterday. So you hang up and open the minibar to fish out something to wash it down with, and you find it stocked with canned iced tea. With lemon. And Nutrasweet.

The table tent on top of the bar says it is $3.50 plus tax.

And an 18% gratuity.

And you wonder madly for whom, but it doesn't really matter and maybe you don't want to know. The road has its own rules, and thinking you can have what you want just because you're paying for it doesn't mean that that's true.

Like just because you're sleeping in the Bible Belt doesn't mean that Satan isn't living in your minibar.

(To be continued.)

A Husband of One's Own

The tall guy here is my husband Roger.

He is wonderful.

It'll be our 15th wedding anniversary this fall and I've long since gotten used to that word, "husband," but I remember that it took a while. Actually, "husband" was never what bothered me; it was the first-person possessive that threw me in the beginning: my husband.

Because I'd never thought I'd have one. And not like, Oh, a Ferrari, I never thought I'd have one, or A brain tumor, I never thought I'd have one. But like I'd woken up one morning with a fluffy pink cottontail on the end of my butt: I never thought I'd have one. And, as with a cottontail, probably, it wasn't an unpleasant sensation, but one did feel vaguely followed.

I used to watch him when he wasn't looking and think, What does he want? It worried me no end because I didn't want him expecting anything, you know? Like if he wore me down long enough I'd turn out to be Donna Reed underneath it all. In fact I made it clear to him many times and in no uncertain terms that I was not going to turn out to be anything if I could help it. I had turned already as far as I had any interest in turning -- I was finished. And if he was looking for something in a warm and sentimental yin sort of model he had better hie himself back to the Barbie side of the board and pronto.

My husband thought I was cute when I said such things. He harbored a not-very-secret conviction that I was actually far more benign than I appeared to be. Ironically, I believe it was this blind and staggeringly stupid faith which saved us, because in a clear-eyed marital meritocracy there is no way in hell I could have earned him.

My Nick

This is my Nick, a beautiful child if I do say so myself, and I do. He is taking fencing lessons while I'm away. And tennis lessons. And badminton, volleyball, hockey, basketball and football lessons. And a baseball clinic. This is by way of allowing my husband his work, his sanity and a little peace five mornings a week. Also by way of distracting Nick from the lengthy absence of his mother.

You wouldn't suppose he would miss me because I am not a gifted mother. I know this from my acquaintance with the other kin

d -- mothers who host playdates featuring tubs of Jell-o to frolic in, hand-cut vegetables to snack upon, inflatable pools with slides and sprinklers for which they could and did figure out how to work the electric air pumps that came with them.

I'm the other kind. The kind who sits in the kitchen reading the newspaper while the children play videogames on one of the shameful four game systems in my living room. The kind whose pantry filled with cookies and freezer filled with Otter Pops are open to independent raiding because I really can't be bothered to deal with snacks that require preparation of any sort. The kind whose dogs are permitted to follow the children placidly around, willingly trading the cacophony and peril of a pack of lightsaber-wielding boys for the easy score of unattended crackers and whatever falls from the children's mouths while they scream at each other.

Your basic nightmare, that is me. The other moms o

n my block are much, much better at it and know enough to feel guilty for allowing their children to romp in the unhealthy, risk-fraught playground which is my house, but there's not a lot they can do about it. By virtue of my having no particular time for children, the children are drawn to my house like flies to donut holes. And I, hoist by my own petard, am the lord of the flies.

Yes, I am not a gifted mother. But he misses me. This is unfathomable, but children are not known for their sagacity and thank God for that.

Things have been slow around here the last day or two and I've little to report. Or maybe

I'm just preoccupied. Maybe even mothers of no discernible maternal

talent get a little blue without their little boys.

So, here's lookin' at you, kid. Mommy misses you, too.