For What It's Worth

The White House: Where the Party Never Stops

Charlotte Safavi is an Iranian-American journalist who writes for numerous publications, including the Huffington Post. 

Flipping TV channels last night, I caught a snippet from National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets (2007), the bit where Nicholas Cage's character emerges furtively in full scuba gear from the murky depths of the Potomac River late at night. He unzips his sopping wetsuit and steps out in a pristine tuxedo. 

tux.e.do (noun)
1. men's formal clothing
2. man's formal jacket
3. man's formal uniform for crashing White House parties

I digress.

Back to the movie, the next scene shows Cage waltzing into the onscreen President's birthday party, a twinkling fairytale affair staged at Mount Vernon.

Did I mention Cage deftly eluded the security detail by toting a bottle of champagne and bemoaning a brunette who got away?

I laughed before turning the TV off, partly out of incredulity for the outrageous plot line and partly because I have a twisted sense of humor. Apparently, the leap from Silver Screen shindig to White House soiree is pretty seamless these days (thanks to fine-quality black stitching).

Funeral for a Friend

Charlotte Safavi regularly blogs on the Huffington Post, and has written for other publications including The Washington Post. Though born and educated in England, her heritage is Iranian and she now resides in Northern Virginia. 

Last year my eight-year-old son R.J. showed me a bird's nest in our silver maple. The wide-girthed tree crowns our modest backyard, an earth-bound shelter for suburban fauna, scrappy squirrels, toothsome chipmunks and commonplace feathered friends.

I decide the nest belongs to robins. Not because I saw anything through the murky blur of my kid's binoculars, but because he found blue eggshells on the ground beneath the nest.

"R.J., help me take out the trash," I say one afternoon, words that I will regret shortly.

I lug the overflowing recycle bin and he pulls the trashcan-on-wheels down our sloped driveway to the street. While I rearrange newspapers running like a creek, R.J. walks back up the drive.

"Mom, come," he shouts. "A baby bird fell out of the nest!"

Sure enough, a fledgling lies on the patio, beak gaped, neck distended, claws curled, a sad thing. R.J. stands transfixed, before breaking off and running erratic circles around the lawn. For a child who cried inconsolably at age three when a car blew up in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, his reaction does not surprise me.

Remembering Swayze: My Dirty Dancing Story

Charlotte Safavi is an Iranian-American journalist who writes for numerous publications, including the Huffington Post. 

Everyone has a Dirty Dancing story. This is mine. In the mid-80s, a year out of Oxford University and a year into an investment-banking career at Manufacturers Hanover in London, I decided to dance. I quit my job, packed my bags and moved to Los Angeles. I wanted to cut a rug in Hollywood.

My first job was at Triad Artists, Inc., one of the principal talent agencies at the time. Among a large roster of clients, they represented a young actor called Patrick Swayze, best known for his ensemble character work in films The Outsiders andRed Dawn, and for his television part in the miniseries North and South. He was about to start shooting his first movie as a leading man--Dirty Dancing--for an indie film company called Vestron Pictures.

Like 'Baby' Houseman (Jennifer Grey's character in the movie), I was seduced. My Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze's role of a lifetime) was Hollywood. The town dirty danced to a different beat and it did not take much to be smitten. As I shimmied up the ranks, from delivering scripts in the mailroom to getting on a desk as an agent's assistant (sort of a glorified secretary), I made the metamorphosis from agent trainee to motion picture literary agent.

After my promotion, my old boss Joe Rosenberg took me out on the town to introduce me to the players. The first breakfast I had at the famous Polo Lounge in The Beverly Hills Hotel was with Joe and Steve Reuther. At the time, Steve worked at Vestron Pictures and Dirty Dancing was his baby.

Green is the New Black

Charlotte Safavi is an Iranian-American journalist who writes for numerous publications, including the Huffington Post. 

Street fashion in a vibrant green hue played an inadvertent yet memorable role in the political turmoil that followed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's controversial reelection. In-house squabbles continue behind closed doors in Iran and open-Web debates continue on social networking sites across the world. The one thing largely undisputed is green remains affiliated with former opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi who has named his new civil rights organization the Green Way of Hope after his campaign color.

How did green get so chic?

Shortly after the announcement of Iran's contested election results on June 12, 2009, Iranians opposed to the outcome took to the streets in protest. They believed the vote was rigged. Some carried the opposition's signature green banners, posters and flags. Others wore green kerchiefs, t-shirts and wristbands.

The precursor to green street fashion was born.

Another fashion foray-of-sorts came less than a week later when members of Iran's national soccer team, including the captain, put on green wristbands with their football jerseys for a World Cup match against South Korea in Seoul. The green was loaded with meaning -- so loaded that for the second half of the game, the players were told to remove them as the game was being broadcast live on Iranian state TV.

Becoming a Green Girl

Charlotte Safavi is an Iranian-American journalist who writes for numerous publications, including the Huffington Post and the Washington Post.

"Mom, don't go. I'm worried."

My son R.J. knows exactly where I am headed -- and he is nervous.

"Honey, there's nothing to worry about," I reply. "People do this all the time in America."

Earlier, I had told him and my American husband that I planned to skip the Alexandria Little League picnic and instead attend a peaceful rally in downtown Washington. The demonstration had been organized in support of the protesters in Iran who were disputing the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A multicultural woman of Iranian parentage and British birth, I spent a few years of my childhood in Tehran, but attended the British School and identified more with my English peers than with my fellow Iranians. I immigrated to America in 1985 after graduating from Oxford and have been here ever since. Though I look the part (olive skin, dark hair and almond-shaped eyes), I rarely feel Iranian as I go about my daily life as a mother, writer and wife in Northern Virginia.

Today, however, I found myself uncharacteristically weeping over a YouTube video showing various clips of Iranian women protesting on the streets of Tehran. I did not expect to feel such kinship. But I was compelled to support them, even from a world away.

Got Green?

Charlotte Safavi is an Iranian-American journalist who writes for numerous publications, including the Huffington Post

Last week as Iran's Tweet-A-Thon raged on my Facebook, an unrelated post caught my eye from an American Facebook friend, "Green twitter pictures are stupid as f***." I knew my friend did not know what the green images meant. But his comment made me stop and think.

Since the disputed election results of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's win came out of Iran on June 12, 2009, green wheels started turning on the Internet. The clamp down on international press coverage in Iran only meant green-colored avatars spread faster than the plague on the social networking sites, now operating as de factonewsrooms.

I scroll through my Facebook friends' profile pictures. Among them, I see simple statements of protest on green backgrounds: Where is My Vote? Where is Their Vote? Free Iran. I see bold graphics on green squares -- a clenched fist, the black snail-shaped map of Iran, a splatter of red. I see recent photographs with green elements -- a pair of green-ribbon bedecked fingers and thumbs forming a heart-shape, green-painted fingers making the V sign, defiant Iranians demonstrating on the streets of Iran in green clothing and accessories.

I am most touched by my American Facebook friends, many of whom are not multicultural mutts like me, who have taken on green avatars, some by green-washing their regular profile pictures. Of course, I know those who have not changed their profile pictures -- I have not -- also support the Iranians. A plea for democracy in real time spreading throughout the Web is potent and addictive.

Color for a cause is also powerful. Think of the pink ribbon of breast cancer awareness, the yellow ribbon of wanting to see loved ones home safely, the red ribbon of AIDS.

Green is the Color of Growth

Charlotte Safavi is an Iranian-American journalist who writes for numerous publications, including the Huffington Post

I am a child of nowhere--at least I thought so until this week. Though born in London and educated at Oxford, my heritage is Iranian. Both my parents are from Tehran, where I also spent part of my childhood. I immigrated to Los Angeles in 1985, later married an American and gave birth to an American son. When it comes to explaining my cultural identity, my head spins uncontrollably like that of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. No single country defines me, rather a combination of all three, depending on the situation. Living far from Iranian family and friends in suburban DC, Iran has been creeping lower on my totem pole.

But this week feels different. The Iranian in me is piping up. All you halves and mutts, like my son, all you multicultural schizophrenics, like me, there will come a time when parts of you come to life when you least expect them. However long or for whatever reason you suppress them, those parts of you that are from somewhere else will be at the fore.

For me, it started on Facebook. At first, the election in Iran meant little to me as an American bystander with no Iranian passport and no right to vote, except that I think a dangerous president who denies the Holocaust should be in a lunatic asylum, not running a large country.