Suburban Familiar

From the Left

2012-01-14T11:52:00.001-05:00

On Writing...

The Funky Chelsea

I was very friendly at one time with a couple who lived at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. He was a writer of sorts producing scripts and speeches for a variety of corporate clients for live and video taped events. He had a then to me, curious habit of walking every morning to a favorite expresso bar ( this was pre-Starbucks) and spending several hours writing and sipping several cuppas. I didn't understand this behavior at all, but I was not at the time, doing much writing myself. I hired writers when I needed one.

Now I am writing; daily and for several hours whenever possible and I have a greater understanding of both the process and practice. For example, right now I'm sitting in the cafeteria in the massive hospital complex that is St. Barnabus in Livingston, New Jersey. My mother is resting in recovery having gone through a serious and discomforting procedure. She's fine for the moment. I am relieved.

But here I sit, surrounded by a sea of chattering humanity many of whom are health care professionals. You can pick them out by their white labs coats or sea foam green scrubs. It's lunchtime. No one person captures my interest for very long. We take no particular notice of one another. Conversations around me are peppered with words like social workers, track meet, my desk, ultrasound, social media and Aruba. They are bits of conversations you might hear in any large nice American cafeteria but for the sea of green and white which helps distinguish the nature of this place -- that and the number of hip pockets with stethoscopes.

There is, I have discovered over time, a kind of comfort I experience when writing in a room like this, a room filled with others going about their lives. While my rich inner monologue continues at full speed ahead and my writing continues unabated, the focus required to do this, in spite of the fuss around me, keeps me company. I think I understand why my friend did his writing in an expresso bar. Writing is a solitary experience but has the advantage of being more transportable than other artistic habits.

Sam I Am -- Not.

I am reminded of a Dr. Seuss book, Green Eggs and Ham. Sam I Am eventually discovers he can eat them anywhere with anything. I can write that in a car, stuck in tar, in a bar. Well, you get the idea. I entertain myself and may be a curious sight, smiling and making faces, squinting as I sit here with my ever present black and white composition book open to the wrong side of the page as I fill them back to front to ease the flow and pressure of writing long and left handed. I’ve always had to compensate in some way for being a lefty. The world is counter designed to our needs. (I loved Ned Flanders’s Lefties Emporium on The Simpsons.) Perhaps that’s why lefties lead shorter lives; we always have to swim against the tide.

I’ve just noticed how much it has quieted down here since I started writing this entry. The noon lunchtime rush has thinned out considerably. I suppose I should get to eat myself but I’m not really hungry. My hand is tired though. I’ve put in a couple of good hours exercising my craft since I arrived here early this morning. It’s been a brilliant distraction from worry.

I have been in the company of others without having to tend to anyone’s needs. I’ve been writing about all kinds of things, which always lift my spirits, and moves me forward, including this little epiphany. For this all to brief moment, all is well.

Watching the Defectives

2012-01-08T09:33:00.001-05:00

In many, if not most households across this great land of ours, family evenings are frequently spent in front of the television hurling support or insults towards favorite and despised sport teams and players. In our home, the sport of politics is our addiction and our teams generally lean left -- but it would be delusional and presumptive to say our team is Team Truth since that is in the eye of the beholders and there are at least six in our household at any given time, not including the animals. Each has its opinions and own ideas which makes for lively and infuriating debates at dinner time, sometimes with ourselves. The title of this blog does not necessarily refer to the illustrious Republican field this season, however fitting that might be, but might also be used to describe we, the impassioned viewers of the bloody sport we call politics. So, what makes us so addicted to this Battle Royale in which real victory is never decisive in spite of there being a winner?

I lay the blame for this addiction squarely upon our matrilineal lines. Both my mother and mother in law are members of the Fretful Democrats, a distinction earned by both age and temperament. I’m not suggesting that either possess the prescience of Cassandra, as learned as that might sound; but that both like Ms. C, believe our nation’s actions are all going to take us to hell in very near future. I’ve come to understand that part of this belief stems not so much a deep understanding of how the world operates per se, but rather from a deep discomfort with a world that changes – a natural occurrence which both toddlers and the elderly find disconcerting to adjust to. Just when you think you get the lay of the land, some dagblasted new fangled War or Conflict or Social Crisis comes along to shake us to our very core. We need to prepare them with transition time! And so, in politics just like in many professional sports, we have the Preseason. Let’s face it, this election year has been filled with lots of interesting players, many of whom have already been sent back into the locker room to collect their gear. I miss them and I don’t. They’re like the pregame show, sometimes entertaining but really adding nothing to the great confrontation about to take place on the actual playing field.

Last evening, we three gathered round the flat screen and watched the rather tepid Republican debate armed with the universal team mascot, the laptop. Mine was fixed on the Twitter feed following the snarky and inane and occasionally insightful. My son was engaged in an on-line battle in cyberspace since only he possesses the ability of the young to occupy two mental platforms simultaneously. My husband was following the news feeds on the more legitimate sites and reading informative technical stuff. I was the only one laughing.

With the invention of Twitter and particular hashtag feeds, I was able to flit between and betwixt my regular crew of malcontents and miscreants, the #NHdebate feed and the #GOPdebate feed. If you watched the debate or have read any post-debate analysis, you know by now that the field was occupied with a more courtly and polite crew of players then has been seen in past confrontations. You know that there were lots of artfully played dodges and defensives moves. And you know that the anticipated victor easily won. You may even know that along the way were some wacky and clearly unanticipated plays.

Please allow me to share a few of my personal Twitter highlights with a bit of context, which you may have missed.

Tweet of the evening:

Huntsman makes a quip in Chinese. Mitt should answer in French. And Ron Paul in Klingon.

Paul Begala

Columnist for Newsweek and The Daily Beast

Context: Mitt attacked Huntsman for working for Obama to further the Democratic agenda on trade while the Chinese are stealing intellectual property. Huntsman quips back that Mitt is naïve and says something in Chinese no one understands.

Running a close second:

I’m bored now. I think I’ll have a drink as well as a joint. GOP Debates are a gateway drug.

Bubblegenius

Random funny guy coming from Burbank.

Context: About 30 minutes into the debate with nothing on the economy, jobs or healthcare touched upon. It just made me laugh.

From my regular crew:

Why is a thrice married adulterer lecturing on the sanctity of marriage? Gingrich is the biggest hypocrite on this.

JoyVBehar -- Comedienne

Context: In a protracted dialogue with all candidates about gay marriage (They’re all against it but some believe a civil union is ok – no surprise.)

Perry never met a country he didn’t want to re-invade. He’s still pissed about the Alamo.

JoyVBehar

Context: In response to Perry’s unsolicited remark that he would go back into Iran and George Stephanopolis has a Barbara Walters/Herman Cain reaction – as in What??

When Gingrich talks about “moving to a 21^st Century model”, Callista better watch her back.

BorowitzReport

Andy Borowitz -- Comedian

Context: Newt pontificates, Andy responds.

From the Mainstream media:

Gingrich tackles Ron Paul’s ‘chicken hawk charge’: ‘That’s part of his charge.” Then Paul stands by the charge.

Washingtonpost

Context: The best and most vivid moment of the debate when discussing the role of the president as Commander in Chief and whether actually having served in the armed forces is important. Gingrich on the defensive about his deferment and Paul shoots back that he may be against war but that he served when he was called to serve and he was also married at the time with two children. Gotcha Newt!

What a game I watched!

You can follow me on Twitter as popculturediva2 where I retweet and tweet when the mood strikes.

FAIR AIR PLAY

2011-12-18T09:00:00.001-05:00

Tucked away in the corner of the business section of a recent edition of The Los Angeles Times was a small piece attributed to Reuters entitled “FCC to erase 83 outdated media rules.” The article contained the following: “Among the rules being eliminated are Fairness Doctrine Regulations that were intended to promote honest, balanced discussion on controversial issues, when introduced in 1945.”

The rationale for its elimination is the proliferation of both Broadcast and Cablecast channels, which have provided the diversity of viewpoints that the FCC sought to ensure. Clearly FOX News and MSNBC are great examples of this spectrum. It is both comforting and disconcerting that the polarized spectrum of our political debate is manifest in each, without overt public disclosure. Neither outlet is “fair and balanced”, in spite of claims made to be otherwise.

Television news was not without its bias and opinions from the early days of broadcast news. Growing up in the 60’s in Suburban New Jersey I can still remember the station managers of the local network affiliates (NBC, ABC and CBS at the time) doing editorials and rebuttals as part of the daily programming mix -- each time with the disclaimer that the opinion expressed did not necessarily reflect the opinion of the employees and management of the station. I’m not even sure that I truly understood the full content or context but these singular opinion makers were my heroes in those days. I was always interested in hearing what they had to say. We had no “critical” or editorial reading in school and no newspaper delivered to our home with any consistency or with parents suggesting I might actually read one.

Most memorable of these broadcasters was one Kenneth H. McQueen, manager of the ABC (Channel 7) station in the New York Market. (The network outlets in the New York, Chicago and Los Angeles markets were O&O’s, or owned and operated by the corporate entities since these were and still are the largest markets or the ones with the most Television Households vs. affiliated stations in smaller markets.)

Mr. McQueen appeared on the screen one evening wearing a big red fireman’s helmet and I recall he spoke about something related to the New York City Fireman’s union demands and how they should be supported. I’m sure I barely understood the context but his beautiful diction and impassioned language made a lasting impression.

Fast forward many years and I had to occasion to meet and work with Mr. McQueen on his inevitable descent down the corporate ladder, a victim of alcohol abuse and age. He was still the handsome articulate man I remembered from my childhood and I told him so. He was, after all, the station manager during the tenure of my greatest news hero of all times, the unrepentant and incontrovertible Roger Grimsby.

If there had never been a Roger Grimsby, there would never have been a Chevy Chase doing the news on Saturday Night Live and certainly no John Stewart. Grimsby begot Chevy who begot John.

I started watching Grimsby in 1970 when he was paired with the charming Bill Beutel. WABC Eyewitness News was my go-to news spot for the next 15 years. Every evening he began the show with “ Good Evening, I’m Roger Grimsby, here now the news” and ended with, "Hoping your news is good news, I'm Roger Grimsby." In between, his broadcasts were frequently filled with wisecracks delivered with a deadpan delivery, later mimicked by Chevy Chase on SNL, and he had an on-air running feud with Howard Cosell, Jerry “Geraldo” Rivera and Gossip queen Rona Barrett.

He once segued from a report on a garbage strike to a Rona Barrett gossip report: "Speaking of garbage, here's Rona with the latest . .

Another time, after a series of scandals had been reported in Newark politics he quipped, ” If Diogenes were to visit Newark these days, he’d put out his lamp.”

Introducing Howard Cosell for a sports report one night, Mr. Grimsby said, "And now let's go to the president of the Howard Cosell Fan Club." Howard had a huge ego and after days of snide comments exchanged on camera, Cosell launched into a nasal diatribe and over the top attack on Grimsby. When he finally finished, the camera cut to Roger is sitting there, eyes closed and snoring, pretending to be asleep.

His quips were legendary but he was sensitive. He was the ONLY American news anchor in1977 to visit and report on South Africa's racial and political strife, following the tumultuous summer of 1976. In "Adoption: Who Are My Parents?" Grimsby, himself an adoptee, focused on the search of adoptees for their real parents. Both shows earned him Emmys.

Roger Grimsby made several movies including Woody Allen's Bananas, Ghostbusters, The Exterminator and Nothing But Trouble. He also had a bit part in the move The China Syndrome.

My personal favorite Grimsby tale - After a studio wide-shot caught his colleague Mara Wolynski using an extended middle finger as she finished an argument with someone off-screen, Grimsby, with a straight face, looked into the camera and quipped, "Well . . . as Mara Wolynski would say -- 'We're number one.'"

And indeed they were. Eyewitness News changed the personality of News forever and Roger will always be numero Uno with me.

ABC fired Grimsby on April 16, 1986 after 18 years on the air in the largest television market in the country, most as the leading evening news show. No one has come close since.

Top 2nd Grade Chef!

2011-11-22T17:27:00.001-05:00

My Traditional Turkey

I have written before about food and cooking in several Suburban Familiar blogs. I have included the general attitude toward cooking in my childhood home where Peg Bracken’s “I Hate to Cookbook” had a place of honor. Our vegetables and crescent rolls came from a can. My mother baked something called Hot Tuna Cups, which was absolutely disgusting, in spite of spawning an excellent rock band just a few years later. We occasionally had those horrific TV dinners -- sparking sibling battles because no one wanted the Salisbury Steak version, even after they added the coveted Apple Brown Betty desert. Friday nights we had Chinese food or pizza delivered but in her defense, my mother did squeeze fresh orange juice for all of us every morning, believing it possessed amazing restorative powers.

In spite of such inauspicious beginnings, I love to cook and I am a terrific cook but I wasn’t always one. (I still feel I need to apologize to my brother and his friend Steve for almost poisoning them in the early 70s with an inedible meal from my first Wok.) But I practiced over the years and my evening audience is usually thrilled with the results. My repertoire now encompasses a gluten-free twist on favorites, no small accomplishment in my humble opinion.

Looking for something to do with all that leftover
Halloween candy?

There is, at least in my household, no holiday, which revolves around food more than Thanksgiving. I make a great turkey but I am always open to getting tips and ideas from others. So it is in this spirit that I present the following Thanksgiving recipes, carefully transcribed from a festive bulletin board I happened upon, outside a second grade classroom. Only the names of these 8 year olds have been changed to protect the innocent.

On the making of Turkey:

First, shoot a turkey. Next burn off the feathers and take out all the insides. After that put it in the oven for 6 hours at high. Last, take it out of the oven and eat it. Enjoy! --Andy

First, buy a Turkey at Whole Foods. Put it in the oven for 7 hours at 60°F. Then let it dry for 3 hours. Finally, get it out of the oven and enjoy it. --Julie

First, buy a Turkey at Kings. Then, cook it for 2 hours at 250°. After that check to see if it’s the right temperature. Take the turkey out of the oven. Last, eat the turkey. --Eva

First, you get your Turkey. Then you put it in the oven for 6 hours. Next, you shoot some seasoning into the Turkey. Then you eat it. --Mack

Another Traditional Interpretation

Are the side dishes your thing?

Cranberry/Raspberry/Strawberry Sauce

First get jelly and cranberry juice and mix it together. Next put a teaspoon of sugar and add cranberries, strawberries and raspberries and mix it together. Then, put it in the refrigerator for 5 minutes. Then, enjoy! --Brie

Sweet Potatoes and Marshmallows

First, get sweet potatoes. Then cook it in the oven for 4 hours at 120° F. Last, put marshmallows on it and enjoy! --Jack

Mashed Potatoes

First, get some potatoes at the supermarket. Next, take the potatoes and cut them into little cubes. Then add milk and mash! --Leif

So no matter how much cooking you do or don’t do this Thanksgiving, remember writing clear directions for your recipes is an important part of the celebration.

And to all of you, dear readers, a very Happy Thanksgiving!

The Crafts of Creation

2011-11-17T19:47:00.000-05:00

COLD TYPE AS CLIPART

For the many of us who have worked in the communications arena in the last 40 years, we all witnessed the dramatic diminishing of the soiled-hands processes of creation. There was something greatly satisfying about manipulating type, one letter at a time, in the curtained chamber of a machine called a typositor. You would look through a viewfinder at a kind of filmstrip that floated over exposable paper. You would then line up the right character in the right place, adjusting the knobs to move the letters closer or further apart, or adjust the slant of the italic, or raise or lower the bottom of the letter – all measured by eye – press a button, expose the image, and out came a strip of the most elegant and crisp version of a particular font you could possibly imagine. Such were the headlines I created back in the day. It was a painfully slow process, akin to chiseling type on a tombstone, yet remarkably fulfilling.

Once you had your headline, you would move on to the body type, which was created in a much more boring mechanical manner. Then it was time to prep your boards used for printing. All those words needed to be put in their place. For that, we used rubber cement. You might end your day covered with gobs of it, using it to make scars on your arms and the back of your hands. It was a nursery school finger painting moment. Whee!

OUR GORGEOUS ABCs

Whether you were compiling a fancy brochure or completing the layout for a quick flyer or an Ad for a local paper, the skills and tools required were the same. There were days when you mistakenly sliced off letters or burned yourself using the new fangled wax machines that quickly replaced the very inefficient but endlessly entertaining rubber cement.

And then there was a time I turned a middle-aged man into a zombie with my heavy-handed efforts with black and white retouching paints. It was all in learning curve of mastering your craft.

As my career blossomed, I spent less and less time doing hands-on work and became a supervisor of these efforts, which expanded to include video production. I now had more to do with the ideas behind the production than the actual physical creation. But having the actual hands on experience enabled me to speak to and direct the designers, artists and video crews with a real understanding of the processes and their limitations.

In this supervisory capacity some years later, in a be-careful-what-you-reap episode, I quickly learned the importance of providing these kinds of services within a large corporation. I had been on the job for less than 14 days; working in a converted strip mall along Florida’s Hwy 90 in Clearwater Beach, Florida. With a minimum of orientation and a maximum of responsibility thrust upon my young executive shoulders, I had, as one part of my charge, the supervision of a small in-house graphics department which provided services to a wide variety of corporate marketing and communications needs. The staff consisted of a typesetter, 3 paste-up artists and an Art Director. The typesetter was from Chicago, over 60, and really funny and the rest of the crew was local and barely out of high school. The company had not yet commenced its national rollout, was not yet known coast to coast -- exploding in one year from gross revenues of $10 million to $780 million in the next. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I was there. It was madness.

The company broadcast or cablecast 24 hours a day of live programming to homes across Florida and a few cable systems in adjoining states in the south. We had just started broadcasting in the New York market. (For more chuckles on how that all worked out and then some, check out :

http://suburbanfamiliar.blogspot.com/2010/07/wing-nut-commander.html

from July 2010

http://suburbanfamiliar.blogspot.com/2010/08/its-calamity.html

from August 2010)

We sold “schlocky” merchandise to those who called in to a massive sales room, housed in another building along Route 90. Those who called in and were lucky and somewhat articulate, were selected to speak directly to the “Show Hosts”, providing an endless supply of banter or “testimonials” about the merchandize and this new fangled experience of shopping via television while the camera remained fixed on the item for sale.

EARLY SHOP AT HOME PROTOTYPE

Part of the pitch frequently included showing Ads from catalogs, displaying much higher prices than we were charging for the same item. Part of what the in-house graphics department did -- was actually create these catalog pages. I didn’t know this yet. But one day, when I walked into the studio, the art crew was in stitches. Our offices were filled with television sets so we could all watch the programming wherever we went, usually with the audio off. I think it was part of some kind of mad indoctrination thing, that and the pale green shag carpeting was enough to make you insane. Anyway, the camera was fixed on a “catalog” page for an item -- I cannot recall what it was --that had just been comped up by one of the sloppier paste-up artists and apparently the type was not adhering to the board. My little art crew was yelling and laughing, “Stop the close-up! You can see the cut marks! Oh no, the type is lifting off the board!“ It was only then that I began to understand what they were talking about.

I called my boss, the Senior VP of Marketing. He returned my call several hours later suggesting I mention this to our new in-house legal counsel who suggested I come over to his office, which was housed in yet another and much fancier office in a much much larger converted strip mall further south along Highway 90. I drove over in my convertible, music blaring, top down. I spent the bulk of my free time that year growing a tan while I drove from department to department. The corporate campus was still two years away. As I explained to Mr. In-house Counsel how we were creating “sales collateral” for the show, his face kept getting redder and redder. He was brand new to the company as well. I explained that up until that day, my third week with the company, I didn’t know that we were producing this material, that we were, in effect, actually defrauding the viewers.

That was the last time we created this kind of material for the shows. No one in the Art Department had any sense that what they were doing might be wrong—or if they did, chose not to say anything about it. In the long run, the company didn’t need to do these Ads. There was enough money and endless credit in those days for anyone who wanted to buy something they saw being hawked, to just pick up the phone and call us. And they did. Creation can be crafty.

Hello again, It's me.

2011-11-12T12:11:00.000-05:00

Fantasy advice I needed

There is without doubt, a sweet pleasure in seeing long lost faces from an idyllic childhood after many years. We were a tribe of little children united by our geography and similar socio-economic conditions. Like any other tribe in history, our connection was temporary. The ebb and flow of our shared educational experiences brought us together and apart in the intervening years. We grew up in the woody suburbs in New Jersey at a time when most of our Moms could stay at home and we played outside with our neighborhood friends till the sun began to set; a rite of passage that has come and gone in this post 9/11 world. But for one too brief night in an overdressed hotel, we were transported back to those beginnings; the occasion, our 40^th High School reunion.

Some were faces I had not looked at in over fifty years, never even expected to see again. Some evoked poignant memories long forgotten. While those moments may be fleeting, they are the touchstones that chisel and define us in our journey.

I could write about the memory of singing “I’m ‘Enry the Eighth I am” on the blacktop with my classmates or sharing a fascination with those handsome men from U.N.C.L.E.. I could write about learning the truth of the birds and the bees with my playmates Linda and Jayne from a new girl on the block seeking our friendship, from whom we were then collectively forbidden to play with. I could relive with witnesses that moment in Mrs. Berg’s fifth grade class when we learned our beloved President Kennedy had been shot and we saw that our teachers could cry. There were the field trips to Becker’s Farm, the air raid drills where we hid under our desks to avoid deadly nuclear fallout, the brightly colored S.R.A. leveled readers or the gender defining assembly when all the girls and their mothers watched “Growing Up and Liking It”, a salute to menstruation and none of the boys were invited. But there was barely time to say hello again, how are you?

We were some of the last representatives of the Baby Boomer generation at a time before political correctness had constrained the structure of public education. There was no dyslexia, no ADD, no processing issues. There were only kids who were dumb -- evidenced by our trading in our grammar school meritocracy for an academically stratified Junior High School with three other tribes from neighboring schools. It’s hard to imagine what was in the minds of those educators who thought chopping all of us up and labeling us 7-1 (the brightest) to 7- 10 (the least) was somehow beneficial to all the learners. This first demarcation into haves and have nots was based solely on what our teachers thought our potential and destinies were to be. Those relegated to 7-10 became the dropouts and the bullies. How else might one defuse the humiliation they must have felt being placed in the “dumbest” class? We all knew what the numbers meant. We had spent hours in classrooms with these children. Awkward!

Thankfully, in high school the tracking was somewhat mitigated by our after school interests. The competition for grades or scholarship had nothing to do with these experiences. It was here that we might find like-minded friends. As the Art Editor of our High School Newspaper and Yearbook, as well as a very active member of the Drama club, the friendships forged from these efforts were ones that I carried forward. It was the in the spirit of collaboration, of teamwork – whether on the field or not – that a person’s true mettle might be measured. It is no surprise that those are the people I most wanted to see at this event or continued to see or had already reconnected with somewhere down the line as our lives went off in all kinds of different directions. There were too few of you there on Saturday night, but we will talk again soon.

A classmate remarked at the reunion that it was like Facebook LIVE! And I think for many it was just that. Facebook took away some of the surprise as well as some of the need to reconnect. We came armed with information about one another already. What was really left to talk about? I was “friended” by close to 30 of my former schoolmates before I even walked into the stuffy hotel.

Nonetheless, seeing all these faces again, in one small space was sweet for they are the keepers of your early memories. Reliving moments with first loves, first play dates and sleepovers is a special treasure while we still have the health and good spirits to do so. Nothing is funnier than laughing about our crazy neighbors (We had so many!), kooky siblings, and wacko parents with people who experienced them as you did. This is a time to share those we lost in the intervening years as well. There is no small comfort in this.

My advice? Should you choose to attend your own 40th reunion, come with an open heart and mind. Be kind. Be thoughtful. Stay in touch with those who touched your heart and reminded you of those sweetest times. Don’t bother with those who hurt you or offended you. Life’s too short. Then go home and hug your family. And remember, your kids will probably be laughing at you at their own reunion.

Occupy THIS!

2011-11-01T19:47:00.000-04:00

"Democracy doesn't come from the top. It comes from the bottom. Democracy is not what governments do. It's what people do." ~ Howard Zinn

I'm old enough to feel a deja vu

Having successfully reached what is euphemistically called middle age provides one with a wider berth and a broader and hopefully more informed perspective on the world. So I watch the OWS sit-ins with both anxiety and hope for our collective futures. I’m a parent and that comes with the territory. I know enough about the history of the world to reflect that all great changes in any society began as a disorganized, rather disjointed effort to refocus values and sensibilities. I also know that real change takes time, often decades, to infuse itself into a culture, of the mindset, and that it is never an easy path. The media has provided us with a group of political pundits, who take great pleasure in devaluing and minimizing the OWS group by pointing out its lack of leadership, its convoluted message, and general disorganization. But it is these very factors that give me pause, that make me take this committed collection of malcontents seriously.

I also know that except in times of crisis, like the Great Depression or a world war, government leaders are paradoxically too responsible for things as they are, too invested in the status quo, to actually take on the responsibility for making changes in the “system”, however inequitable or malfunctioning they may be. It takes the unrest of the educated but under utilized, under employed, and under valued masses – the people – to demand change. To those in control, those for whom equilibrium is essential, that is discomforting and frightening. In that group I would include all of the following: Politicians, Economists, University Presidents, Power Brokers, and Bankers.

I love Political Graffiti!

I wonder if they understand that history is not destiny -- as much as they would like it to be. Certainly our war efforts have made money, just like it did in World War II, only this time not for the American worker. Privatizing the efforts directed profits only to those companies able to participate. History doesn’t ever tell us where we’re going, only where we have been.

I’ve thought a great deal about the responsibility that historians take on. Imagine the daunting responsibility for interpreting the past through the lens of the present! How does history and our definitions of progress, peace, growth, and development, change through time? Just consider how Christopher Columbus is treated in schools today versus forty years ago. Today he is presented as the person who is responsible for the genocide of millions of Native Americans. In my time, he was treated like a hero. Is that a form of Progress?

Consider first the notion of “Peace” as a worldwide concept. John Lennon’s “Give Peace a chance” kind of Peace. When I was in grammar school, we had drills where we hid under our desks in anticipation of some imagined worldwide nuclear attack from our red counter super-power, Russia. How many of our neighbors built bomb shelters in their suburban backyards? Today’s public school students, who have actually died in their local schools at the hands of classmates, conduct mandatory lockdown exercises every month. A real threat may be sitting in the next desk. What does Peace mean to this generation? What did Peace mean to my generation?

I might have defined Peace as military alliances between nations under threat from mutual enemies. It was -- Us versus Them. But is that definition of Peace still relevant in a world filled with millions of more literate and diverse populations living within single nation-states? Are our borders going to remain even relevant when technology links us all in an instant? Will our distinct cultures provide a better demarcation of on which side of any political question we may fall? Should we allow ourselves to be reduced to our differences?

More fundamentally, isn’t it less expensive to live in a peace filled world than in a world at war, and shouldn’t that be the goal of our leaders whose vision must transcend the needs of the few for the needs of all?

Even kids know this. Since I frequently have the opportunity to work with teenagers, I asked a random collection of 14 to 17 year olds how they would define Peace and Progress. Here’s a sampling:

Romi age 16 –“I believe peace is economic and societal stability. I believe progress is expansion and a fairer but looser system that protects workers from the decisions of big banks but also allows those who are driven to make a profit from their ideas and talents. Progress also allows those less fortunate into the market and to have a larger hand in the economy.”

Ellen age 15- Peace is… “When there is no war because war costs money. Progress is when new aspects of technology and business are created. This allows the world to move forward and grown into a new version of society.”

Dan age 16 – “Peace is no involvement in wars inside or with foreign nations. Progress means competition in inventive technological and practical developments. Keeping checks and balances in commerce and avoiding monopolies.”

Greg age 14 – “There is no war, no draft and all militarys (sic) home. This is an obtainable progress. The government has achieved the goals they set forth. Progress is a state in which the economy prospers and commerce increases. A state in which money and assets are generally equally spread out and most are content.”

Those participating in OWS protests across the nation and the world are, I predict, only the first wave in what will be a long hard road to a new future in which Free Trade becomes Fair Trade and in which education stresses collaborations and critical thinking to build a better tomorrow for everyone. Our youth already understand this. For everyone that leaves the site of a protest, I predict that they will be replaced.

In 1792 the brilliant Thomas Paine said, “My country is the world and my religion is to do good.”

The time will come when leaders will emerge, when the message will be heard, and real changes will happen, because that is what history is. And it starts now.

I drive me crazy

2011-10-27T18:56:00.000-04:00

Classic 80's Graphics was SO cheesy!

I’ve been hearing about America’s love affair with the automobile for years and I must admit, there are moments when I see a car that makes me want one of them. But honestly, automobiles have been one of three things in my life: The shortest distance between two points, something else that I don’t understand how it operates, and a place to listen loudly to music that I’m the only one in my nuclear cluster likes. I’m not sure that’s what the American automobile industry wants me to take away from their efforts, but it is what it is.

Thank you Johnny, my Speed Racer!

I learned to drive after most people my age. I was always a late bloomer and it wasn’t until I graduated college that I actually got around to getting my license and learning how to drive. I have to thank my younger brother for this. My first car was a slightly used little red Toyota Celica with a stick shift. I had no idea how to use the stick but my then 14-year-old brother apparently did and he became my driver’s ed teacher. We drove around for hours until I mastered the technique. I still remember being in the middle of an intersection somewhere in Livingston and being unable to get the car into gear. My brother was in the passenger seat screaming at me and I was laughing so hard, I was crying. I could not for the life of me, get it into gear. Once I mastered the technique though, I loved driving a stick and the control I had.

Later on in life I bought a white on white Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible, also a stick. I loved it. It was the perfect beach car for those years I lived in Clearwater Beach. I still owned in when I moved back to New York City in 1989 and would put the top down and blast the heat in the middle of the winter driving down 5^th Avenue with the top down and the music up. Wheee!

The Hoff and K.I.T.T. -- still cheesy!

What I recall most about the horror of car ownership, and it continues to this day, is the headache of registration, licensing and license renewal at the Motor Vehicle offices. When my husband and I left Manhattan to come to the burbs about 14 years ago, we had to get New Jersey licenses. That meant taking the written test again.

DeLorean made it cheesy, not Doc Brown.

Now that my son has reached the age of permit, another series of visits was required to get all the forms and tests completed. On a recently Saturday morning I was back at Wayne, our closest MV office, to pick up the red tags that we needed to affix to our license plates to indicate there was a “student driver” at the wheel. The fact that an in-person visit is required to do this, rather than an online order process ($4 per car) just shows how backwards and user unfriendly this system is. The offices open at 8 a.m. so I was in their parking lot by 7:20, anticipating only a small crowd. I’ve seen that line wrapped twice around the building and it’s not a pretty sight. As the hour drew near a jovial face appeared at the door with a pencil tucked behind her ear. With an efficiency that would be envied by any branch of the military, she had this motley collection of now about 50 coffee-starved souls, sorted and assigned to various positions flanking the front door. Then she announced, “ I’m sorry, we have no pens in the building. If you have one with you, fine. Otherwise I would recommend that you go to your cars now and retrieve one.”

Who you gonna call?

Standing behind me (I was placed in the first position by the door since my request required no paperwork! Oh, happy day!) , was a well-groomed young man who turned to me and said in thick Germanic accent, “I thought this vas a first world nation!”

“No,” I replied with shame. “You’re in New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the country and our Governor has apparently reduced the pen budget.”

“Aha!” he replied. “I have a driver’s license for Hong Kong, for Europe and even one for parts of Africa but I have never seen anything like this.”

“Welcome to the new poorer America my friend. It will drive you crazy.”

It's Reunion time!

2011-10-18T18:31:00.000-04:00

Coming to your future.

In about three weeks time I will be joining a group of people I haven't seen, for the most part, for more than twenty years and in many cases, more than forty years. Yes, it's High School Reunion time again. I have decidedly mixed feelings about attending. What distinguishes this meet-up, besides my growing older and wider, is the playing field is somewhat more leveled by our respective ages. While we refer to ourselves and are referred to as solidly middle-aged, reaching two years shy of sixty seems a bit further along on life's journey than midpoint.

There will be those attending who have aged well. There will be those attending who have, with surgical assistance, maintained a more youthful countenance and there will be those who, suffering from a combination of ill health, genetics, plumb bad luck and questionable lifestyle choices, have crept closer to the decrepitude that comes with old age.

Dressed for Dinner.

Lest you think I'm being cynical, I can assure you, old age is not for sissies. I see examples of about once a week when I visit my mother in her nursing home. I try to time my visits around meal times. I do this for a variety of reasons. First, because it provides my son and I with an opportunity to engage others in conversation with her and we are then not bombarded with or limited to her repetitive repertoire of complaints and intimate ailment inventory. Each meal there serves as a kind of reunion of sorts. Names and faces that may have been forgotten are recalled, though they very well might have last met less than 24 hours earlier.

Some residents dress for dinner, some scream for it and some silently wait for their meals draped in their lobster bib-like accessory, mandatory dress code for both lunch and dinner. Her tablemates are an eclectic assortment of aged and infirm, joining us on their own steam supported by metal walkers or rolling in on their self-propelled four wheel carriages.

Most have trouble hearing and I wonder if after all those hours I spent at rock concerts, driving with blasting car stereos and now listening to my iPod, will have an early deteriorating effect on this most fragile sense.

In some ways it might be better. The hate speech and vitriol that fills and fuels what passes as News today frequently feels toxic. Perhaps in not being able to hear it, I might finally reach that Nivanian state of bliss, aka ignorance.

Poor little Dobby

When my mother first arrived at her new home, my son and I joined her at her first dinner. All meals are served in a spacious dining room and seating is assigned. As I stood behind her, at the next table a wizened woman who resembled Dobby, the house elf from Harry Potter, peered up at me from her power wheelchair.

"Hey", she cackled, " You're new here. Why are you here?"
"This is my mother"I explained. "She just arrived today."
"Really? Why did you bring her here of all places? This place is awful. The food is disgusting. It's a hellhole!"
"Really?"
"Yes, yes it is. How did you find this place?"
"I just googled hellhole."
"Aha hah hah."

Those hard of hearing residents in the vicinity could hear well enough to "get" my response and appreciate it. It was comforting to learn that while our hearing may fade away, a sense of humor appears to be eternal. I do hope we all bring it to the reunion.

iCarol

2011-10-09T11:52:00.000-04:00

iCEO Jobs and his iPhone

This week we all lost too early, a brilliant and brusque visionary, Steve Jobs. Others have who knew him have written beautifully of his contributions and human foibles. I’m not going to do that. I am just going to point out his affect on me and that’s why this is iCarol.

What I’ve been thinking about is names; mine in particular and others in general. Consumer products with names like the iPhone, the Pentium Chip (see this week’s New Yorker magazine to learn more about how this name came to be.), and Kleenex exist throughout their lifetimes with occasional modifications, marketed as improvements and iterations, but we don’t get that chance. I am and was Carol. Not Carol, new and improved or Carol One or lowcal Carol.

I think that’s a huge missed opportunity for humankind. All the other Carol’s that I meet are at least 50 years old. It’s the name of an old person. It didn’t age well. I resent that. I didn’t even get to have a vote on my name. No focus groups were held to determine whether Carol was the right brand name for me. If we are being told today, we are our brand, I don’t want to be saddled with a name that puts me in a doddering package.

And clearly, I am not the same as I was 50 years ago even if my name was the right name at the time. I want a new and fresh name, something that captures who I am right now, that has aged well.

Cousin Ice Cream Cone

I experiment with this notion when I work with young children. My married name is Cohn, as in Ice Cream Cone. It is not the two syllable Cohen or Co-hen. Just the short and sweet cone so I tell the little ones that my name is Mrs. Ice Cream Cone. I do this for both practical and educationally sound reasons. Practical because it’s likely they will remember my name and educationally sound because research shows that happy learners actually learn more and that success breeds success. Part of what makes learners happy is being successful. In this environment, Mrs. Ice Cream Cone clearly works for me but I’m not sure it’s right anywhere else.

Uncle Traffic Cohn

When I was pregnant with my son, we did get lots of helpful and not so helpful ideas for names from friends and acquaintances. In no particular order or preference these included: Gengis Cohn, Shaka Cohn, Traffic Cohn, Kubla Cohn, Ice Cream Cohn, Safety Cohn, Waffle Cohn, Soft serve Cohn, Pine Cohn, and Snow Cohn. Our favorite came from a friend of my brother’s who suggested Jimmy Crack Cohn. While entertaining, we rejected them all and went with Miles which appears to be working just fine and seems like a good fit.

So for those of you who know me only as an adult or know me best from childhood or those adolescent years, please don’t think of me as a Carol. Suggestions and recommendations for an updated, better name are being collected right now and I welcome your input.

Help! My 16 year old is calling from a Mexican Prison

2011-08-01T12:48:00.000-04:00

Visions of Terror

I’m sure all of you at some point have received an email from a diplomat or wealthy foreigner in Nigeria who is asking for a mere $300 to help them move millions of dollars from his homeland. He graciously offers a percentage of this as a reward for helping him in a letter typed in all caps with gross spelling and grammatical errors.

Here’s the latest twist in our too connected world and it happened to us just this week. My In-laws live in Southern California. We live in New Jersey. My In-laws are independent and both over 85, God bless them.

Imagine my mother-in-law’s surprise when the phone rang in the middle of the day and it was a young man who said, “Hello Grandma? It’s Miles (my son’s name). I’m in Cancun.”

My mother-in-law has had the good fortune of traveling just about everywhere in the world and launched into a chat about her visiting Cancun before the fancy hotels were built and how interesting the ruins of Tulum are and not to miss them.

Then this young man, my supposed son, said, “Listen Grandma, I’ve got a problem. I went to Mexico with a friend of mine who won a free 4 day trip to Cancun and took me with him.”

“How terrific!”

“Well the thing is, his cousin picked us up at the airport but we were stopped by the police as we were leaving and his cousin had a little bag of pot that the police found. I didn’t have any drugs and I only get one phone call and I don’t want to call my parents and upset them. “

“Oh my.”

At this point another person spoke, identifying himself as someone from the consulate office (really, in Cancun?) and assuring my In-Laws that Miles was not in any serious legal trouble, but he needed to post bail so he could leave the country. They were told that they could wire $3400 from their local Western Union, which they knew was in a Rite Aid drug store very close to them. Yes, the callers knew this ahead of time.

“Miles” now got back on the phone with my Mother-in-law and begged her to please not tell his parents.

The Walk of Shame

My mother-in-law assured him that she “crossed her heart, she would never tell them and noted that “Miles” sounded different.

“That’s because he’s been crying M’am” the other voice on the line said. He then instructed her to wire the money to the Western Union office in Mexico City.

“Why Mexico City if you’re in Cancun?” she asked.

The gentleman told her that Miles' lawyer, a Mr. Goldberg, had his main offices in Mexico City but if she had any further questions, to please call him and gave her a phone number. He added that since “Miles” had no drugs he could get out but they shouldn’t say anything about drugs when they send the money to Mexico because it could be put on his record

She then went to my father-in-law and recounted the whole tale. My father-in-law picked up the phone and called the number she had been given. This gentleman answered the phone and when my father-in-law asked if this was a scam was told,

“No sir, it certainly is not.”

So, my very addled in-laws drove to their bank, took out $4000 in cash (anticipating fees and incidentals their dear grandchild might need) and drove to their local Rite Aid per instructed. Unfortunately, there was no parking available so they drove down the block as bit to their local Trader Joes. This lot charged for parking but if you got your ticket stamped at Trader Joes, parking is free. So naturally my mother-in-law went into Trader Joes and bought a bottle of wine to get her ticket stamped. I should mention that they are both Depression babies and watch what they spend very carefully.

They were naturally very upset about the whole and had a conversation about whether they should call us or not. They didn’t want to tell my husband that his son is in trouble-- since my Mother in law swore to “Miles” they would take this to their grave -- but they decided to call and check to see if Miles was out of the country without revealing why.

While she was in the store, my father-in-law called my husband.

“Ric, Hi! It’s Dad. I’m just calling to make sure you got the package I sent last week.”

“Oh, hi Dad, how are you? Yes we did, thanks. ”

“So how is everybody doing?”

“Everyone is fine. We’re excited about coming to visit you in two weeks. Carol is out grocery shopping and Miles is at his friend Richie’s house.”

“Really? He’s not in Mexico?”

“What are you talking about Dad?”

A gentle villian

And then the cat was out of the bag. So if my father in law hadn’t made the call or my husband not happen to be home, some guys in Mexico would be $4000 richer.

When my son heard the story he called his grandparents and thanked them for helping fake Miles out.

“Hey, if you were willing to send fake Miles $4000. Would you like to send it real Miles?”

Ha! Only if you’re calling from a Mexican prison kid.

That which is Sublime.

2011-07-16T06:13:00.000-04:00

I have great respect for language. I worship at the altars of great writers who craft each sentence as part of an assemblage --- which when we step back, takes our breath away. How do they know which words belong? It is my intention when writing my little blog, to respect my readers and give them something worth reading both in thought and deed. Whatever the subject, I try to provide my readers with honest and comfortably digestible copy. I’ve written about the power of music, the joys of theatre, the engagement of movies, becoming a Mother, honoring friends, celebrating artists and even the weather. I’ll write about almost anything that strikes my fancy in the moment. Writing a blog is like exercising. It keeps my skills sharp for the big projects. But I’m not kidding myself. These little vignettes are not great literature. I’d like to produce great literature someday and I’m working on that, slowly.

JMW Turner's Snowstorm at Sea

When I was in college, I took a class entitled “The Philosophy of Painting”. It was an introduction to the philosophies of Aesthetics. My professor, whose name I cannot recall, was a rather round Danish fellow who obsessively paced the floor and never made eye contact with any of his students. I have a vivid memory of his pastel scarves, long blonde hair, fierce blue eyes and rather sweaty forehead. He spoke with flourishes and passion while his ten students raised their eyebrows. He was absolutely bonkers and Ludwig Wittgenstein was required reading. If you are unfamiliar with Ludwig, I would certainly understand. While he is considered one of the great philosophers of this century, most of us don’t have the time or inclination to include Philosophy in our Must Dos. But I include him in this blog because what he said provides a framework for talking about The Tree of Life, the actual subject of this blog.

Here are three of his gems:

1. A picture is a fact.

How can we deny that which we see? Wittgenstein talks about vision as a personal experience. He famously asked, if I see (the color) Red and you see Red, how can we ever be sure we are seeing the same color? Does my vision of Red look the same as your vision of Red? Is the actual color relevant?

JMW Turner's Sunset

2. What can be shown cannot be said.

One might consider this a more profound consideration of a picture being worth a 1000 words. Wittgenstein considers that what we see is unconstrained by the limitations of language, that there is a distinct visual vocabulary.

3. The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

This is my personal favorite because it helps me to recognize the limitations of a single culture as constrained by its vocabulary. If a particular phenomenon does not occur within a culture, does it even require a name or if there is something that has a profound impact or presence in a culture, is just one name for it enough? One example, Greenland has 38 words for snow.

Sean says little

So here’s my dilemma – I don’t want to diminish the experience of The Tree of Life by reducing it to words. I cannot possess the vocabulary to do it justice. As I sat in the theatre I so wanted to capture my experience of seeing with my words, to be in the moment, to be present. It’s not often that a word like beatitude or transcendent are experiential or even appropriate. Yet there they were on the screen in front of me. There is Commerce and there is Art and the difference was never so apparent to me as it was witnessing this film, a haunting and melancholy and largely narrative-free depiction of the selective nature of memory, of the profundity of loss, of the complexities of love, of the scars of disappointment, and the miracle that is creation. Yes, I’m talking about a movie.

It’s not a film for everyone. It’s two and a half hours long and will not make for a great social exchange at its conclusion. I would never call it a date movie. It speaks to each viewer intimately. It is more like standing in front of a Van Gogh or JMW Turner or walking into a Cathedral or witnessing the landscape of Yosemite and your breath is taken away and you want to hold on to that feeling in silent solitude.

Brad the Dad -- unlimited by words

They are those few moments in life when what we witness fills us with a sense of wonderment, and demonstrates the presence of a higher being or power, an intelligence which surpasses our expectations of understanding. We bask in that profundity and recognize genius.

There are very limited moments when we can take the marvelous word sublime off of its special mantel and apply it. The Tree of Life is one of those moments. It is that which is sublime.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. – Ludwig Wittgenstein

On the FRINGE!

2011-07-08T20:37:00.001-04:00

I am frequently drawn to crazy and if you are a Facebook friend of mine, it should come as no surprise to you that I am slavishly devoted to FRINGE, a science fiction television series created by J.J.Abrams (creator of LOST), Alex Kurtzman (co-writer of the most recent and wonderful STAR TREK and upcoming COWBOYS AND ALIENS) and Robert Orci (writer and producer of television standouts, Alias and Xena:Warrior Princess).

With these three extraordinary talents combining forces behind the scenes to create FRINGE, the results are an intelligent, clever, engaging, original show with strong female characters in a genre usually dominated by male heroes. It has been described as a combination X Files, Twilight Zone and Altered States but what FRINGE possesses that those three did not, is a campy awareness of itself and a broad sense of humor. As earnest and sincere as these scientists and investigators of the "Fringe Division" are; charged with the task of saving our world, the writers relieve the tension with juvenile jokes and character self-parody.

Consider this exchange between mad scientist Dr. Walter Bishop and his son Peter:

Peter Bishop: You brought your own sweetener?

Dr. Walter Bishop: Don't be ridiculous. My medication.

Peter Bishop: You're not on any medication, Walter.

Dr. Walter Bishop: Of course I am. I've been making it myself in the lab.

Peter Bishop: Oh, I wish you were joking.

Dr. Walter Bishop, brilliant madness

Or this with a young child:

Dr. Bishop: When the Victoria, the last surviving ship, return to its harbor of departure after the first circumnavigation of the earth, only 18 of the original 237 men were on board.

Small Child: What happened to them?

Dr. Bishop: They all died, young lady. Horrible and most likely painful deaths. You see, when you open new doors, there is a price to pay. Now imagine... tonight, you look under your bed, and, lo and behold, you find a monster! And you're immediately eaten. Now, if you hadn't looked for the monster, you wouldn't have found it and you'd still be happy in your beds, instead of being slowly digested in the stomach sack of the creature. But, with any luck, your sister or your brothers might have heard your screams, and your endeavor will serve as a valuable lesson to them.

Noble Actor

The characters and their counterparts in the other world that coexists with ours are wonderfully complex and nuanced -- none more so than Australian actor John Noble. You may recall John from The Lord of the Rings trilogy as King Denethor. Perhaps you were a fan of 24, when he portrayed Russian Consul Anatoly Markov. In FRINGE, John gets the juiciest, wackiest roles (Each actor has a doppelganger in an alternate world.) on television, that of Harvard educated mad-scientist Dr. Walter Bishop and his other world counterpart who is the Secretary of Defense and billionaire owner of Massive Dynamic. Dr. Bishop is a brilliant mad scientist who with his partner, William Bell (portrayed by Leonard Nimoy!) did a bit of ethically questionable experiments for the U.S. Government. This included testing a drug called Cortexiphan on a group of children; including the fair Olivia, the beautiful blonde leader of this Fringe battalion.

The Fair and Strong Olivia

When Walter’s son Peter was a little boy, he died of a terminal illness, leading the fine doctor to travel to this parallel universe to steal Peter's double. Each actor portrays himself in our world and the alternative world where the Statue of Liberty is made of Brass and the Twin Towers still stand, except for singular Peter.

Walter Bishop spent 17 years in Saint Claire's, a mental institution, following a lab accident that resulted in manslaughter charges while his partner (Leonard Nimoy!) in this world betrayed him and built Massive Dynamic. Dr. Bishop was released into the custody of his son Peter to solve a series of unexplained phenomena, called Patterns, which were taking place around the world. His memory is sketchy because his brain is missing parts that he supposedly asked William Bell to remove and he has a pet cow in his lab.

William Bell, as portrayed by wry Nimoy, is as muted and understated as he should be. The bromance between the two, in spite of his betrayal, makes for great silliness.

William Bell - Spock

As I consider these two having much too much fun together I have to consider how well prepared they both were for these parts. In the case of John Noble, he already went off the deep end in Rings and devolved from a stern tyrant to madman much like the duality of his characters in Fringe.

With Leonard Nimoy as William Bell, I have to ask myself if his portrayal of Spock has added some gravitas to his scripted brilliance in FRINGE.

The big questions is does an actor benefit from his previous roles and the perception they created with his viewers? Is there a legacy in an actor’s series of fictionalized characters that provides a certain gravitas to his subsequent performances in ?

If you want to sample Fringe, I might suggest you try the episode:

Lysergic Acid Diethylamide
(It’s available online at "http://www.fox.com/fringe/" for your viewing pleasure.)
It will delight and surprise you.

I will close with one of my favorite Walterisms:
“We're all mutants. What's more remarkable is how many of us appear to be normal.”

Wha?? Not guilty.

2011-07-05T23:32:00.000-04:00

The Gloved One

It was my mixed fortune to give birth to my son right at the start of the OJ Simpson Trial. So those first most tender weeks were spent glazed and blissed and nursing my new son while Marcia Clark and her investigators spent 133 days stumbling over one another and ultimately allowing a cold-blooded murderer of two people go free. It was not my intention to necessarily follow the trial but I was living in New York City, taking time off from my business and home all day long with a colicky baby. Simpson and his team of truth stealers were dominating all the air-time and in 1995, it was the best Reality TV out there. The murders also took place on my birthday, which was very annoying although my dear friend Anne, whose anniversary is on 9/11 has much more to complain about -- should she choose to.

I remember watching the trial and knowing it was doomed and I knew the same was true for Casey Anthony. The parallels between the two cases are remarkable and bear mentioning.

Consider, when first informed that his wife had been killed, Simpson did not ask how, when, or by whom.

Consider, that the police had accumulated enough evidence indicating Simpson's guilt in the murders and obtained a warrant for his arrest. His attorney, Robert Shapiro negotiated an agreement where Simpson was to turn himself in at police headquarters by 10:00 on the morning of June 17, the day after Nicole's funeral. He didn’t show. He was driving around Orange County in a white Bronco (what a perfect car to be chased!) with over $8000 in cash, a fake beard and mustache, a loaded gun and a passport in the car. Does this sound like the behavior of an innocent man?

Casey Anthony spent 31 days partying and dancing and getting tattooed, all while her daughter was still “missing”. Her labyrinth of lies to the police, her parents and reporters were ridiculous. She lied about being employed at Universal Studios. She lied about leaving Caylee with a baby-sitter. She told police about two imaginary people she had told that Caylee was missing. She even lied about receiving a phone call from Caylee (who placed the call?) the day before she was finally reported missing. Does this sound like the behavior of an innocent woman?

Here's Johnnie!

What did the glove matter to the Simpson case? Nothing, but it was bandied about just like the duct tape that couldn’t be used to indict Casey. They were distractions that had no meaning but to distract and confuse the jury -- just like the incest and molestation charges Casey made about her father.

There was also confusion about the chloroform and why it was so important. Chloroform is a chemical compound that can be used to knock someone unconscious and also is found in human decomposition, but prosecutors failed to make clear exactly what role it played in little Caylee's death or what it’s presence meant.

It all brought back the testimony of forensic criminalist Dennis Fung, who Barry Scheck painfully eviscerated on the stand. It was this testimony for me that sealed the outcome of the trial. Fung was painfully unprofessional and incoherent.

All in all, the prosecution lead by Ms. Marcia Delusional Clark put forward 72 witnesses. Consider that for a moment. 72? Are you kidding me? At the OJ trial, the jury was so exhausted from listening, that they spent only three hours in deliberation.

Casey Anthony’s pathetic excuse for an attorney, Jose Baez, came out swinging; laying blame and recasting the crime in a variety of guises with a variety of conspirators both named and unnamed, mostly Casey’s poor shell-shocked family. Again, it was all too reminiscent of Johnnie Cochran’s summation for the defense in which he compared the prosecution’s case to Hitler’s campaign against the Jews; blaming racist cop, Mark Furman, as though he had committed the crimes or at the very least, planted evidence. Never proven, only wildly claimed, just like the claims made about George Anthony.

In today’s Daily Beast, Marcia Clark claims that the Anthony verdict was a bigger calamity than the OJ verdict. No Marcia, it’s not. We can all see through your delusion. They are both equally embarrassing, even disgraceful because the prosecution on both cases did such a pathetic half-assed job that the jury was left with no choice but to let the killers go free. -- And oh so shameful because the innocent victims will never get their fair day in court.

Iterations of Sondheim

2011-06-24T15:34:00.000-04:00

Seeing the movie of Stephen Sondheim’s Company that was made of the four performances at Lincoln Center was a shock to the system. I am an over-the-top Sondheim fanatic and while not every show hits it out of the park, my senses were first jolted by a performance of Company in 1970 at the Alvin Theatre in New York City. I was a young impressionable teen and I had never seen anything like this.

All my musical fare to date was limited to Rogers and Hart (The Boys from Syracuse and Pal Joey) and later Hammerstein (Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music), Lerner and Loew (Brigadoon, My Fair Lady and Camelot), and Bye Bye Birdie, Hello Dolly ( Carol Channing was amazing but I also saw it with Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway!), and the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan.

All were great shows with many memorable tunes and wonderful sequential stories with easy to follow plots - stories that were structured the way you would expect them to unfold. But Company was/is something else entirely – a series of vignettes revolving around one central character, a single man in a sea of married couples. This was, in it’s time, groundbreaking. I remember that didn’t walk out of Company feeling happy and satisfied or humming anything in particular, but I was dumb struck.

Mandy -- Born to sing Sondheim

I’m sure part of my shock was that it talked about marriage as adults might talk about it. This was clearly a show with music written for adults. In my own childhood home, marriage was combative and ugly, ending in divorce. For a very long time, I didn't know it could be otherwise. Company incisively captures the highs and lows of these relationships and is both uncomfortable and brilliant.

The other thing that made me catch my breath was it’s ending. I had never seen a show that ended without a resolution; that was left open to interpretation, to the viewer’s projections. It was not the what (Bobby seeks out his own life, leaving his married friends behind.) but the why. Why did he need leave them behind? I was too young to understand. No show with music had ever left me so bereft.

In the years since then I’ve seen Company twice more, not including this latest iteration. I must confess to you dear readers, that there are a few shows that I have seen a few times. At the top of this list is Sweeney Todd, another Sondheim production and IMHO, his masterpiece. I've seen at least five versions of the show.
The first was the original with Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou (1979) when the theatre was transformed into the bowels of London. Then there was a filmed version of the Broadway show. The third was an incredible revival with a ten-person cast (2005) who each played an instrument. There was no orchestra but the music was played in new Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht-like orchestrations (They of Three Penny Opera fame.) This rather stripped down bare Marxist twist on the production starred Patti LuPone (Mrs. Lovett - Tuba & percussion) and Michael Cerveris* (Sweeney - Guitar). I just loved learning that Ms. LuPone had played the Tuba in her high school marching band! Some years ago we took our son to a local theatre camp production starring a seventeen-year-old Sweeney with an unfortunate lisp. The family then watched in wonder at Tim Burton's interpretation starring Johnny Depp. I call these: Sweeney Todd, Teeny Todd, Der Schweeney Todd, Ss-weeny Todd, and Burton Todd ( the opposite of Liz's encounters) -- just to keep them straight in my head.

Patti pulls it off and then some!

But this film version of Company was unlike any other musical I’d ever seen on film or stage. Part of it was that the performance was taking place at Lincoln Center for the audience at large, not the screen viewers. As such, each gesture and expression was done for those “out there” while the camera captured each performer up close and personal, so close in fact that you could see the amount of pancake make-up in their pores. This put each actor under unusual and untypical scrutiny. It also created a special intimacy with the performers that I really liked. The joy of performance was etched in their high definition faces.

Look at the joy in these faces!

I was very anxious about Patti LuPone being able to pull off The Ladies who Lunch. Elaine Stritch has owned it forever but she blew the roof off! No one does pain like Patti. Neil Patrick Harris is adorable and has a nice voice but he’s no Dean Jones or Larry Kert. It was a treat to discover that Christina Hendricks has great comedy chops. Some of the other minor players like Martha Plimpton and Jon Cryer, to name two of the celebs in this production, are just a delight. Stephen Colbert is so happy to be part of it all but his vibrato is frequently in search of the right note.

That said, the very best thing about this production was the sound! Wow. You’ve got the New York Philharmonic and the latest in audio film technology combining together in a small dark room with great speakers and Sondheim. His music has never sounded so majestic and rich! That made it all worth it.

For a $15 ticket, this was a new and exciting way to experience Broadway and to reach an audience that can’t make it to New York City or can’t just drop $150 plus parking for a ticket to see a show. (Tickets for The Book of Mormon start there.) Yes, I do love going to the theatre in New York City. There is nothing like live theatre, I know I know, but this is great show, an amazing bargain and there are no bad seats. The run was limited but paved the way for more. I know I’ll be back for the next one.

*Fringe alert! Michael Cerveris is the main observer on Fringe. He also played the pinball wizard, Tommy in the original Broadway production of The Who’s Tommy and was deliriously powerful.

The Spice of Life

2011-06-18T12:56:00.000-04:00

It is almost 11am on a glorious Saturday morning after a brutal early evening thunderstorm that knocked out power to much of the neighborhood. I’ve been up for hours, having just returned from Janet’s house. She’s a dear friend and is relocating to California at the end of the month. I will miss her terribly but I am happy for her too. This is something we’ve been talking about for years and is her dream realized. It’s hard not to dwell on the sorrow of saying goodbye but I understand that friendship is never limited by geography in this most miraculous age where high tech facilitates high touch.

This is most evidenced by my time spent on Facebook, so often instant chatting long distance with friends in distant places. It helps that I’m fast on the keyboard but I try not to hijack the conversation. The back and forth nature of it actually captures more of my intent than a typical in-person polite conversation does, where spoken language is more linear. You know how when you’re talking to someone, you have to listen to what they have to say before responding or changing the subject? The automaticity of these written instant zings back and forth enables both parties to “speak” at once, to share any thoughts ---however unrelated ---in real time, and to refer back to what someone has said just in case you weren’t “listening” or your mind strayed off as you were trying to remember whatever it was you wanted to say at some point later in the conversation. I find I value this more as I grow older. This electronic process enables me to refer back to my “notes” and theirs. Ironically, many of my far-flung friends know more about me and how I think, than many of my physically closer ones. The spontaneity of this format of exchange appeals to me. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.

So Janet is soon to be a “distant” friend, but only geographically. In preparation for this departure I was there this morning helping her empty out her kitchen cabinets. We pulled out all of the spices and seasoning treasures and in doing so shared another dimension of our friendship – Cooking. Janet is originally from the Midwest – Ann Arbor, she’s Black and she’s an awesome cook, just one of her many talents. I’m a Jew from New Jersey, love to cook and over the years we have swapped foods and dishes like other friends share books. Her repertoire and mine are different but we have a great appreciation of what tastes good. Her fried avocado slices and chili dishes are to die for. She practically purred over my plum pies and homemade soups.

She’s lived in her condo for years and amassed, as we do, years of stuff – including said spices. She had two cabinets full to be discarded. As the countertop became littered with pretty little bottles and jars, I pointed out her 6 jars of chili powders, 4 jars of red peppers flakes and in the way way back, long forgotten, packages of things that were older than this century. How often have we purchased new things, shoved older things to the back of our cabinets and forgotten about what we already had? What life lesson might be learned from this, I wonder.

We sorted out food for the local food bank, tossed out faded passions and she passed on the “bought with the best of intentions practically brand new” goods to me. I now have a variety of rubs and spices and chocolate powders that will keep Janet here in my kitchen and always in my heart.

In commemoration of her move, I prepared a special gift for her, a CD of songs each of which has a special meaning as a reflection of our friendship and the magic she has added to my life. Just like that in person conversation, the words I might say or write were not enough to convey what was in my heart. Language is limited no matter our eloquence or intent. It is the sumptuous soundtrack of our lives that adds the spice.

To see more of Janet's fabulous art visit her website:

www.janettaylorpickett.com

Shilling for Bread

2011-05-20T10:52:00.000-04:00

I suppose the title of this blog is a bit harsh but I just couldn’t resist the double entendre since I’m writing about what has been characterized as the “gluten free trend.” Most people confuse gluten with bread but it’s actually a protein found in wheat, barley, rye, bran as well as a food additive that thickens or stabilizes and is added to meats and processed foods. Bread on the other hand, also means money and there is plenty of it being made by food manufacturers jumping on the gluten free bandwagon. There is no small irony that gluten makes bread fluffy!

Part of the wide spread hoopla can be traced back to Ms. Chelsea Clinton’s nuptials and the news that the festivities included a $10,000 gluten free cake. Snort at that if you must, but about 1% of the population suffers with celiac disease for which gluten is like eating a slow killing poison. I’m not one of them. I have gluten intolerance or sensitivity and you may too, especially if you are 50+.

To be fair, I must disclose that I subscribe to Time magazine and I usually find their reporting and coverage both responsible as well as reflective of my own sensibilities. (I also think Joel Stein is very funny.) This week’s issue, covering the dilemma that is Pakistan, was no exception but for the inclusion of a one page piece on the aforementioned gluten free trend. The focus of the article was on the recent surge in gluten free products now being offered at our local supermarkets and the misconceptions that consumers may possess about the health or weight loss benefits that might come with going gluten free. It also pointed out that gluten-free has become a major selling point and consumers are equating it with “low carb”. It noted that some people may suffer from gluten sensitivity but there is no data on this.

Now I understand that my relationship to gluten may not be as newsworthy as Chelsea’s cake, but to all my contemporaries who suffer from arthritis (My knees are a mess. Thank you Nana Sophie), autoimmune complications (I have a wanky thyroid.), depression and/or ADD -- or have children or grandchildren that do – going gluten free may help alleviate some of the symptoms. And no, I’m not going all Jenny McCarthy on you. The connection to gluten and “curing” autism is none. Shame on her and the Doctor who claimed that inoculations caused autism.

So, here’s how I became gluten free. About a year ago my husband sent me an article (We email back and forth a lot.) about the connection between arthritis, autoimmune problems and gluten. It explained that gluten was being added to many foods that it was never in before and at higher levels. As a result, people who like breads or pasta (and who didn’t climb on the whole wheat wagon with me?) and other foods to which gluten is added; may over time develop gluten sensitivity. It went on to state that removing gluten from your diet might help alleviate some of the attendant symptoms. Individuals reaching their 50s were most likely to be affected. Apparently we’ve been around long enough to suffer.

So, I called my friend Mary Anne, nutritionist and Celiac sufferer for her advice. My knees were a mess, painful enough to require a heating pad every night and being threatened with replacement by my specialist. Was there a test I could take to determine if I was indeed gluten intolerant? No, she replied. In fact when she had taken a test her condition didn’t even show up. The only way to determine if you are affected by gluten is to take it out of your diet for two weeks and see how you feel.

What a pain in the neck this was. I love to cook and this meant completely revamping my repertoire. All the pastas and breads disappeared. The first week was really rough. But I did it and lo and behold the pain in my knees disappeared. They still creak sometimes especially in rainy weather, but what a difference! My son is now gluten free and finds he can concentrate on his homework more easily. He says that if he eats gluten now it makes him sleepy. Yeah us!

My household has adjusted and I find the gluten free adjustment has made me look more carefully at all of the foods we eat. My carb intake now includes more rice and potatoes and corn – all gluten free. I love Chex cereals, gluten free and not expensive either. You can go to your local Whole Foods and ask for their gluten free product list and they’ll give you a 17-page print out. My only advice - don’t buy the gluten free English Muffins -- ever. They taste like wallpaper paste.

I didn’t take any tests but I can tell you that omitting gluten made a real difference. No one can actually diagnose your sensitivity but if you suffer from any of the ailments I’ve described, you may find relief in the gluten free aisle.

Customer (Lack of) Service

2011-05-13T20:38:00.001-04:00

I don’t blame the people I talk to. It’s everyone else in the world I blame. As a member of the sandwich generation I’m snuggled uncomfortably between raising a teenager and caring for a aging parent. Both can require full-time devotion. Both can require the patience of a saint. Luckily for me, my son is kind, thoughtful and full of common sense because I have never been mistaken for a saint.

Unluckily for me I have a parent who does, for the moment, require all my time. She is unto herself as they say, a piece of work. But she’s all I got so I’m trying to make the best of it while the rest of the world conspires against me.

Case in point. I want to switch her cell phone to a “friends and family plan” I want to pay her phone bills both cell and land lines. I want to suspend her home phone service while she’s in the nursing home. I want to have a message on her home phone referring callers to my number. One might think in the age of the Internet that this would be a slam-dunk since they are all with Verizon. Think again. I cannot do any of this via their website.

3 hours of calls -- separate phone numbers and operators for each service and service change. How many times do I need to be on hold listening to their promotion for Verizon Vios? Even when I finally get to a breathing living human being, they want to know if I would be interested in bundling her cell, land and internet access for $99 a month .... Hello, did you not hear that my mother is in a nursing home?

Adding insult to injury, I am told in one conversation that I may pay her bills by phone. However I will incur a $3.50 fee for the privilege of doing so. I am incensed. “Oh, it’s not a charge from Verizon, it’s blah-blah-blah company.”

“Really? Well just because the name of the payment processing facility doesn’t include the word Verizon, does not mean that the money doesn’t go to Verizon. Do you understand how insulting this conversation is to me?”

Then I try to get her home phone service taken care of. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that I literally needed to hang up and call a different phone number to complete my business. Cell phone and land line customer service exist in two different universes. As a matter of fact just yesterday two Verizon Fios representatives rang my brother’s doorbell at home. He opened the door to a young man and woman who went into a sales pitch. He told them that he hated Verizon (he had used them as an internet provider years ago) and that his sister (lovely me) had just had the most horrendous experience dealing with their phone services. “Oh, but we’re Verizon Fios, we don’t have anything to do with the phone services!”

Again, do you understand how insulting this conversation is to me? Hey doorbell ringers, can you spell Jehovah?

So I have switched my mother over to my account. One less bill for her to worry about I think. Today, three days after the switch, Horizon called her cell phone to tell her that she had exceeded her monthly minutes. (It was actually my phone calls that did it, handling all of the nonsense required to make it all easier.) She was upset by the call because at this stage of her life, she’s upset by any phone call. So I decided to handle it from work. Why they were calling her, the new addition to our service, was beyond me. I called the 888 number she had been given. The sales rep who eventually got on the phone asked my for my billing code number. I did not have the billing code with me but I did have all 6 phone numbers we have with Verizon. I was told nothing could be done without the billing code so I asked to speak with a supervisor. I was told that the gentleman I was speaking with is a supervisor. So I concluded my conversation with “ Your customer service is disgraceful. I hope this call is being taped.”

Not to be upstaged by Verizon, there is their cousin Horizon, the company with the perfect prefix. You know the “Health Care provider”. How does an insurance company become a health care provider? Does it take your temperature? Does it diagnose your ailments? Where are the advertising police on this one?

Horizon provides what is euphemistically called “managed” health care which means they manage to charge you more, the more you use it. At least that’s their strategy when it comes to elder care. They attract a large cluster of senior citizens by providing insurance policies with low premiums and then, when you really need services because you’re getting older and more decrepit, you pay for every aspirin, every sheet of TP and they may limit your days in the hospital or nursing home in any way they choose. My mother fell into this trap and I’m trying to pull her out of it.

The coverage she has is called Horizon Medicare New Jersey, but it is not Medicare, it is just another insurance company. But by using Medicare and New Jersey in its name, it would be easy to see how someone might be confused. Seeking to extract her from this I was told by the business manager at her nursing home that the managed care coverage could not be just cancelled, it would require that she spend three consecutive days in the hospital to receive regular Medicare.

This is not true, this is just boneheaded information and just one of the many substandard services and information the facility has provided. Even the people at Horizon told me this when I called them. But in order to have her released from the insurance, I was told by Horizon Medicare that it requires a “special election”. What, I asked, was a “special election”? I was told that because she is requesting Medicare outside of their “open enrollment period” that I had multiple forms to complete to get a waiver to enable her to do this.

Then I was told that I would also need to complete a “Formulary” for her. A what? A Formulary is the name for the list of prescription medications she receives. I asked if everyone at Horizon called it a Fulmonary. I was told that they do. Then I asked that she email all these forms to me so I could figure out what to do next.

I hung up and called Medicare. Not fake Medicare, the real one. I had a couple of questions for them.

1. What is a special election? Bonilia at Real Medicare said I must mean a "special enrollment election." The inclusion of the word enrollment at least helped to clarify what my mother, the new office holder, was up against. I aksed if this was a Medicare term. “Yes, it is” I was told.

2. How about a Formulary? Is that a Medicare term as well. “Oh, yes it is but Medicare needs to determine if she is a Tier 1 or Tier 2 recipient. “ Ok, I give up. What does that mean? “Well we need to look at all the prescription medications she is receiving and determine whether we will cover it or not.“ What is the reason for covering or not covering a particular drug? I asked. Is it related to the cost? “The ingredients in non generic drugs differ from generic drugs. We need to examine whether or not we cover the particular ingredient.” So, going back to my original question, is it related to the cost of the drug? “Well, it is related to the cost of the particular ingredients.” Again, so this comes down to the cost of the drug. “Well, yes I guess it is.”

Then I asked, when is the open enrollment period. To which she replied that “this year is was October 15^th to December 7^th.”

What do you mean this year? Does the open enrollment period for Medicare (which we all pay for with our taxes) change year to year? And if it changes, how do you notify the eligible consumer what the new open enrollment period is?

“We send them letters every year. Every United States Medicare receipient, whether managed care or not, receive notification via mail. Last year the open enrollment period was November 15 to December 31.”

So then I asked, well why does the open enrollment period change each year. The Medicare person was unable to tell me why. I asked if she could Email a copy of a typical letter to me. No, she could not. It’s no wonder our national deficit is out of control. How much is Medicare spending to send snail mail to seniors every year? Why do the open enrollment dates need to change? I have a headache.

I have to stop now because I need to make another 50 phone calls to people who provide information that is wrong and boneheaded from the scripts sitting in front of them at their little cubicles earning minimum wage and deciding the fate of our families.

COLLEGE PREP!

2011-03-25T20:08:00.001-04:00

Bucolic Academia

So now my son is receiving mail everyday from a variety of colleges and universities. He has apparently gotten on college mailing lists from taking his PSATs as practice in his sophomore year of high school. Some are simple letters with a personalized code created just for him. This, the letters claim, will provide him with a customized cyber-experience of the school.

Taking one of these cyber tours reminds me of a trip my husband and I made to the ruins of Chichen Itza in Mexico. Deep in the heart of the Yucatan peninsula are the ruins of an ancient Maya civilization that disappeared without a trace. According to historians, the city was gradually abandoned some time around 1200.

Look at the steps on the left, amazing eh?

It is a large pre-Columbian archaeological site, which entered the popular imagination in 1843 with the book Incidents of Travel in Yucatan by John Lloyd Stephens. About 20 years later Edward H. Thompson, US consul to the Yucatan, spent over 30 years studying the ruins. The most famous is the Temple of Kukulkan (the Maya name for Quetzalcoatl), a step pyramid built for astronomical purposes. During the vernal and autumnal equinox at about 3pm, sunlight bathes the western front of the pyramid's main stairway. This causes seven isosceles triangles to form imitating the body of a serpent 37 yards long that creep downwards until it joins the huge serpent's head carved in stone at the bottom of the stairway.

At this 6-mile square site you’ll also find The Great Ball Court, about 500 feet by 220 feet where violent and bloody games were held. At the base of the interior walls are slanted benches with sculpted panels of teams of ball players. In one panel, one of the players has been decapitated and from the wound emits seven streams of blood; six become wriggling serpents and the center becomes a winding plant.

The secrets of the ruins, we were told, would be explained to us that evening in a fantastic light show created for English speakers. And so, in that evening’s haze in a jungle abuzz with all kinds of critters and fragrant with the scent of tropical flora, we climbed up on the ancient stone steps of the court where losing teams of ancient times were slaughtered for defeat.

The tinny sound of Mexican music, from speakers on the field, gets us started. Flashing colored light beams imbedded throughout the stadium illuminated the ruins like a 70’s disco in Queens. I anxiously awaited the man in the white sharkskin suit with the Mexican accent to DJ the event and give us dance lessons. Instead we are treated to a pre-recorded tape of a heavily accented reader providing the highlights of Chichen Itza with the flash of colored lights synced to his reading.

Unfortunately it was obvious that the reader did not speak English, although that was what he was trying to do. The only word, besides a stray preposition here and there, that we could understand was Chichen Itza (cheat-zen-neat-za). I deduced that he was reading from a transliteration; a recreation of text phonetically created for the reader which does not include the proper inflection or syllabic emphasis or emPHAsis. My husband and I were laughing at this point because it was completely ridiculous, but for the $40 admission fee.
So now my son and I go on these college cyber-tours in which there are personalized notes and audio/video segments where my son’s name is mechanically inserted much like our tour of Chichen Itza.

Other colleges send colorful brochures depicting ivy covered buildings and autumn leaves inducing in his mother, a jolt of Love Story, where do I begin --- with the attendant sound track. But to my dear young 16-year-old son who has yet to understand that institutions of higher learning use the same marketing techniques as diet colas, the ones with the colorful brochures look like terrific schools to him. We recently received one of these from someplace like “Schluboygen Eastern College” It had a great looking brochure.

“Oh, mom. That looks like a great school.”

“Yes indeed it does look like great but it’s 3 hours from the closest airport, there are no Chinese restaurants or kosher delis in the neighborhood and no one outside of a 50 miles radius of the campus has ever heard of the place. But you’re right sweetheart, it does LOOK like a great school.”

So how does one select the right college? I remember the process from my own childhood as daunting. I had a well leafed through edition of Barron’s Directory of American Colleges that I spent hours combing through. There was one rule my mother made and I had to obey, the school could be no further than an eight-hour drive from home. Naturally I chose the school that was 8 hours away from home. As far as I was concerned, the less scrutiny my mother had over my collegiate activities, the better and the closer I came to breaking her one rule, well that was a good thing too.

I know people who chose a college because they were chasing a love, guys who selected a school because of their basketball or football teams and others who chose a college because one of their parents had attended, even if they had completely different interests. In retrospect, my 8-hour reason certainly seems just as immature and stupid as any of these so I understand my son’s selection by brochure.

Faced with the prospect of paying over $50,000 a year for my child’s undergraduate education is reason enough for us to make a thoughtful and informed decision. Money may not or never grow on trees but it will take killing a forest’s worth of paper for his college education. I hope to use those resources wisely.

Outing Teachers

2011-03-13T15:01:00.001-04:00

The Joy of Teaching...ouch!

The world of public school education is finally getting the attention it should have been getting all along. After all, what could be more important that the education of our children and their children? Unfortunately, bad press is not better than no press -- and that appears to be all that public education can garner these days. Up to now, it has been taken for granted that our public schools would do their job, there would be good and bad teachers that our children would somehow deal with as we did, and they all would go off to college and find their way in the world.

But we live with a public educational system designed to produce compliant factory workers for jobs that no longer exist. It has continued without structural change for over 70 years and now the United States has fallen well behind other nations who have chosen to modernize and update their own educational institutions. The irony is that, as a society we work to maintain the stability of our institutions yet education, for which the knowledge base changes as rapidly as the changes in our technologies, needs to be fluid and innovative. How do we institute change when our institutions function best when stable? Whose responsibility is it to implement, evaluate and manage the change needed? Who gets held accountable?

Research conducted on how we learn and how the brain functions has provided so much valuable information for educators that it cannot be ignored. Countries like Finland and Cuba (!) have made dramatic changes to their schools and the results are in. Their students are better educated than ours because they have modernized and improved their schools based on this good research.

One great example is the notion of looping. In Cuba, students stay with the same teacher from first to third grade. This reduces the learning curve that every classroom teacher in the United States needs to make every September as they begin to understand where each student’s strength and weaknesses lie. This allows differentiation (the right level of challenge directed to each student) to commence effectively from the first day of school. The student and their families build a stronger and more comfortable connection to the teacher and the young learner has stability and understands the expectations and style of the teacher. By the end of third grade, each student is reading and writing up to his or her potential. Interesting, eh?

But back here we appear fixated on what goes on in the classroom and not with what needs fixing with the system. Teachers are the new pariahs. Our Governor, the future President Christie, has proposed that teacher’s income be tied to their performance as measured, in good part by the results of standardized tests. So then I have to ask, who’s minding the standardized tests? Who is deciding what should be measured and how?

Recently my son, a high school sophomore and my own favorite lab rat, spent several days taking the NJAsk and provided for his mother, the perfect illustration of why using standardized tests, as they presently exist, is a huge mistake. Understand that I am not against evaluating and rewarding excellence. I am not against teachers, like everyone else in workforce, earning their raises based on individual performance, but I am against using the tools we have now for this purpose, no matter how you may configure the data. Here’s why:

For the Language Arts portion of the test he was given two different writing prompts on two different days. The first was a photograph of a digital clock from which he was supposed to create a story. This is just the kind of challenge that my son likes and he came up with a crazy three-page story of international intrigue involving defective clocks that blow up if you set the alarm for 12:00.

Smart Aleck Kid

The next day he had a prompt where he was asked to argue for or against mandatory after-school tutoring for students who earn below a certain grade. He’s a teenager, knows he has no control over what happens in school, is sick of taking these tests and thought the topic was “bullshit”. He wasn’t interested in writing a persuasive essay (which the test was presumably asking him to do) and only wrote one paragraph.

Should his response upset me? Should I care that he knows that these tests have no bearing on his grades and doesn’t care about them? Should I want a child who just does what is asked without question? What will the results of these tests show about a student who responds to one prompt and not the other? How will his response potentially affect the evaluation of his teachers?

Most importantly, what do the test designers think this shows? How do you establish a baseline response for this kind of test? How might a good student respond to this versus a struggling student who may very well be angered or upset by the reminder that they would be affected by the adoption of this policy?

If you think for one minute that responding to these NJAsk questions are all an exercise in intellect, you would be very mistaken. The brain of a teenager operates based in the limbic system, which controls our emotions. This is why so many teenagers make so many poor decisions and can be so challenging to teach. They feel before they think and how they feel affects what they think.

So while teachers are being held to more exacting and demanding standards, shouldn’t the tools used to evaluate them undergo the same kind of scrutiny?

Coming from years of corporate America I’m accustomed to performance reviews and believe individual teachers should earn their raises like everyone else in the world. Why should we allow poor teachers to continue inflicting their students? Research indicates that it can take up to 3 years to undo the damage inflicted by a bad teacher.

But if the annual NCLB tests (they have different names in each state) were created to determine the learning and skill level of a student as a tool for the teacher, why are teachers not demanding that the tests be repurposed as a tool to measure incremental learning year to year? Educators all understand that assessments must provide valid measures that align with their purpose.

So, using concepts discussed as far back as 1989 in Stephen Covey’s great 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, it is clear that the tests need to be designed with the goal in mind not measuring student learning but measuring teacher effectiveness.

Educator Grant Wiggins, creator of Understanding by Design (UbD), an innovative tool to assist in creating dynamic lesson plans, asks to what extent do assessments provide fair, valid, reliable and sufficient measures of the desired results? Can we really think that a test, that might take a day or two, can measure the impact of a teacher? What about the teacher who has a higher percentage of struggling students year after year? Do we hold them to the same standard and if not, what is measured?

Christie’s changes including providing tenure by examining standardized test scores, classroom observations and school-wide student performance. But without proper oversight, this will just turn into another effort llke the dismal George Bush NCLB that only enriched the coffers of test writers and textbook creators.

ETS which writes the GRE (for Grad School), Praxis (for teacher certification), TOEFL(to teach English to foreign speakers), AP tests (for high school students), and The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas is currently working on The Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project. The objective is to determine what measures predict the biggest student achievement gains; the MET project will give teachers the feedback they need to improve. In addition, a greater understanding about which teaching practices, skills and knowledge positively impact student learning will allow states and districts to develop teacher evaluation systems that will help strengthen all aspects of teaching.

The results of this study combined with another classroom observation tool will be publishing their studies in the winter of 2011/2012.

So Governor Christie, what precisely are you proposing be used to measure teacher effectiveness when the country’s largest educational test creator does not yet have the answers?

FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD

2011-03-03T21:01:00.000-05:00

The temple of fresh food

The other day while shopping at Whole Foods, the place aptly named since it can eat your Whole paycheck, I ran into a friend of mine I hadn’t seen in quite a while. She’s a very talented artist and teacher and incredibly modest as well. I’ve been to a number of her shows in New York City and taken a number of figure drawing classes with her as well. She is, as they say, good people.

We chatted a bit as one does with friends who are missed, about the time passing too quickly, updating one another on our busy lives, our husbands and children and in her case, grandchildren reaching milestones and then some.

She happened to mention that her adorable grandson, now in first grade, is attending a particularly interesting New York City Public School on the lower eastside in the heart of Chinatown. He spends every Monday through Friday in school until 5:30pm, in large part because he is learning Mandarin. The parents who participate, contribute on top of whatever is received by the city of New York to fund the program.

In this multi-global world, seriously starting to master Mandarin in the first grade sounds like a smart idea. In fact, when I told my husband about it that evening he replied, “Good for him. He’ll be able to communicate with our future masters”

So if what he says is true, in my minds this all begs the question – Will Chinese people seek out American cuisine on Sunday nights when they too, don’t feel like cooking? Do I detect the aroma of a business opportunity? I believe McDonalds is hoping so.

My husband and I are both good cooks. We love good food and I take no small measure of pride in my collection of cookware. I’m a firm believer in quality when in comes to my pots and pans and chefs tools. They include an international cavalcade of brands with Braun (appliances) and Wusthof (knives) from Germany; Sabatier (tools), La Malle (copper and tin bake ware), and Robot Coupe (the father of the Cuisinart Machine) from France: Paderno (amazing stainless) from Italy and of course Amercia’s own Cuisinart brand. There’s more but you get the idea.

Chef Boy-ar-dee

I also have a rather extensive collection of outstanding cookbooks as well as years of back copies of Gourmet, Cooks and Bon Appetit Magazines. All of which are being culled for their most memorable recipes into my new electronic recipes card collection on Bento. The program is pre-formatted for the user to fill in the blanks with typical recipe data including the prep time, ingredients, now many it serves, and directions. Since my household has gone gluten-free in the past 18 months, my favorites and regulars have evolved to reflect this change.

Chef Chef

But I am also conducting this electronic transfer for other reasons #1 I don’t want to end up on “Hoarders”. #2 My son has requested a cookbook from me before he leaves for college. I’ll just copy his favorites to a disc and he’ll be good to go and #3 I just love using my laptop in the kitchen instead of a cookbook. It plays music while I prep! I embrace technology as best I can.

Chef Nathan

But I have nothing on Nathan Myhrvoid, the former CTO and chief strategist for Microsoft who cashed out his millions in 1999 and decided to pursue his passions without the need to actually earn a living. Nathan is 51 years old, holds a Ph.D. in theoretical and mathematical physics from Princeton and did a postdoctoral fellowship with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge and he loves to cook. Nathan is not just interested in the “how to” of cooking; he’s interested in what has been called “molecular gastronomy”. So you may know how to make a hollandaise sauce but he wants to understand why it works. That’s the physics of cooking and what intrigues Nathan.

I share this as his new cookbook hits the streets. It is a six-volume set with over 2,400 pages, retails for $625, and weighs over 50 pounds. Entitled, “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking”, Nathan will make you look at cooking in a whole new way. No novice to the professional kitchen, he moonlighted in the kitchen of a leading Seattle restaurant for two years. He has hundreds of patents issued and pending and is supposedly a world champion barbeque chef. This month there have been articles about Nathan in both Wired and Time Magazine. He’s clearly a modern renaissance man.

Nathan has, according to the experts, perfected the French Fry. All it takes is two hours of prep and voila! perfection. Oh, you’ll also need ultrasound equipment to cavitate (create bubbles) the water for 45 minutes on each side of the potato slice, a vacuum chamber and deep-frying equipment that can be precisely controlled. Other recipes call for centrifuges and rotor-stator homogenizers. The $625 cookbook is the smallest investment required to cook like Nathan.

One of my favorite tales involves the egg. A group of his chefs (he employs 20 in his kitchen) were working on a part of the cookbook involving thickeners. They were determined to unearth everything food scientists knew about how eggs cook. It took two weeks of experimentation but they were then able to produce a graph, which provided temperatures and the ratio of egg to liquid to plot anything from a firm Flan to a runny Crème Anglaise. You can’t find all this information in just one place and that’s just one of the over 1500 features in Modernist Cuisine. You’ll also have to purchase some new staples for your pantry, like liquid nitrogen.

Most new cooking techniques and tools; the microwave, the pressure cooker, the crock pot, have been accepted because they have made cooking easier and faster but Nathan believes there should be techniques and tools that make food better by cooking more precisely.

For those of you who may be interested in learning more about the wizardry of Nathan Myhrvold, I have some good news. His cookbook is being offered on Amazon for a mere $450. If you’ve got the $100,000 or so on top of that for the upgrade on your kitchen appliances, I say go for it and then invite me over to sample your perfect French Fries.

What's in a name? or The (D)Evolution of George

2011-02-04T20:36:00.000-05:00

George the Curious

My first encounter with George was as a mischievous monkey who enchanted his yellow hat-wearing owner. The escapades of this early embodiment of George were hits with the under ten set around the world. Though he spoke not a word, his compassion for balloonless children, children in hospitals and other disappointed by life’s seeming inequalities painted a moral picture with charming illustrations of smallness being no limitation to heroism. H.A. and Margret Rey, authors and survivors of the modern century’s most horrific chapter knew all too well about man’s cruelty to man. First published in 1941 after the couple escaped from Hamburg with the original Curious George manuscript on their backs, it’s no wonder they chose a simian as hero.

George the General

My next George appeared in grammar school when I learned about the father of our nation. General George, a very tall Virginian, had an aristocratic bearing in spite of the false wooden teeth he required. Many myths were crafted to show his humility and honesty, traits that have not been extolled too frequently by our country’s leaders. Coming from the state with the wealthiest, most erudite and educated colonists only enhanced George’s natural appeal and talents as leader. Offered the job of king, this George turned down the position in favor of one more suited to a country of disparate members. His choice, in light of the deposition of friend France’s leaders a few years later, appears prophetic. Clearly no job is worth actually losing your head over.

George the Quiet

My third George was the quiet one. In the go-go sixties Sir George was the balladeer of the mop-headed number one boy band from England. His mumbled, hesitant and self-effacing persona provided a counter to the froth of Paul, the goofiness of Ringo and the tortured soul of John. It was hard to imagine how he ever garnered the attention required to actually have one of his compositions included in any of these quartet’s compilations. Yet - Here Comes the Sun, Something and While my Guitar Gently Weeps, are critical to any Beatles ‘collections. The victim of a brutal home invasion, before the fanzines and paparazzi, he was actually allowed to recover in quiet dignity. It wasn’t until his solo career that I actually paid attention to him at all. He seemed to silently slip away from all of us at only 58 without rancor or scandal, so unlike an icon.

George the cypher

George the fourth was a creature unlike his predecessors. He too wore the mantle of U.S. President but rather than the rakish possessing style of Washington, this George seemed cast out of smoke and mirrors. His rather sanguine and colorless persona, his privileged upbringing and Ivy League pedigree transported to the wide-open ranges of Texas made for a strange mix. He was a hybrid of Southern laid back and New England shrewd. Then there were the years playing cloak and dagger, heading up the CIA. I was discomfited rather than calmed by his presence in the White House.

George the Magazine

George then morphed into a glossy political magazine named in honor of the General who became the first president. Cindy Crawford posed on the cover as our midriff-bared leader, in keeping with the airbrushed treatment of American politics. The astoundingly handsome son of Jack published George. Some year’s later, right after John Jr. had passed his bar exam, he rode his bicycle past me as I stepped outside my apartment building on Bleeker Street. We were both on our way to work in the crisp of autumn’s early morning, just the two of us in a neighborhood usually too noisy and congested to sleep. Even wrapped in his sweater and scarf, he was easily recognizable. George the magazine may have failed to impress but I can assure you that exquisite John did not.

George of the Seven

My life was filled with other George’s as well. There was the George who dared to speak the seven forbidden words. A huge career was launched with this small collection. And then there was the two dimensional George, swinger on vines thwarted always by the unforeseen tree.

George the Tan

One other George comes to mind, he of the tan. I only include him to share an amusing anecdote. I was staying in Beverly Hills on a business trip and I walked over to Rodeo Drive for an early Saturday morning breakfast. I sat at an outdoor café sipping my $7 orange juice and nibbling my $12 croissant when who should drive by in his caramel colored Rolls Royce with the top down but none to wear than George the tan. His complexion and auto body paint were a perfect match.

George the Reborn

George, the reborn was next. Witnessing his puppet show administration (surely the strings were being pulled by someone else…) his disingenuous humility and sheer lack of ambition was disturbing. After reading the commencement addresses Hillary and George gave at Yale University in the same year, I shook my head in wonderment at how we could have elected someone who showed such disdain for the value of academia. His creation of NCLB, the dysfunctional but highly profitable national program still in place, demonstrated just how little he understood about the process of education but did about payback.

George the Best!

Of course I have saved the best, the ultimate George for last. While my delineation is not necessarily sequential, I have chosen the velvet voiced George to conclude my list. He is the George who inspires strangers to wear tee shirts proclaiming themselves to be his wife. He is the George who inspires comparisons to Cary Grant. And if his beauty and grace were not enough, he is also the George who cares about the enormous dire poverty in the world and the rights of the disenfranchised. He is the George who has an endless series of graceful and demure beauties on his arm at all industry functions. We are comfortable with his serial monogamy, which allows us to fantasize about his slippers beside our beds. He is masculine and beautiful and he is George.

Oscarama!

2011-01-30T20:56:00.000-05:00

I just spent the last hour soaking in the tub while reading the latest edition of Entertainment Weekly from cover to cover. It is the issue devoted to all things Oscar, that most coveted piece of American produced hardware; the ultimate trophy. Every year at this time, my attention is riveted to Hollywood and all that glamour. Academy Award night is the one night a year where I watch television for six hours straight. Don’t even try to call me; I won’t answer the phone. I may tweet a bit or stop by Facebook to see what kind of snarky remarks my clever friends may make, but that’s it. Oscar and the fashion cavalcade command all my attention.

I must admit that the prognostication of winners by the entertainment writers and editors who probably have not seen all of the films seems a bit presumptuous to me. It clearly doesn’t stop any of the news outlets in fact, from having an opinion about the films and who deserves and will win. I can do just as good a job of judging that which I have not seen and so I will.

For the purposes of brevity, I will only comment on the films nominated for best picture. I will divulge to my readers which films I have seen or not and suggest that none of my commentary or evaluations be used for determining how to vote in your local Oscar pool if you are actually interested in winning. My projections are for entertainment purposes only.

127 HOURS

To be clear, I don’t want to see this movie. To see where someone has put their arms where it doesn’t belong will remind me too much of the times I put my mouth in places it doesn’t belong, as in – Oops! That just fell out of my mouth -- I shouldn’t have said that. I also just don’t think this is going to win because Danny Boyle won last year for the fabulous Slumdog Millionaire and he’s not going to win with this one. It wasn’t even shot overseas.

BLACK SWAN

A film about a bunch of crazy ladies makes me crazy and feels eerily familiar to me. I like the idea of another ballerina based movie being recognized since The Turning Point with looney Shirley Maclaine and feisty Anne Bancroft was just annoying. Billy Elliot was about a young man so it doesn’t really count, but I don’t think it has the gravitas to win.

INCEPTION

For the spinning hallways and dizzying plot, this kaleidoscope of a film kept me guessing, mostly about how this movie could possibly end. The notion of invading dreams was a swell one. Avatar, or as we call it in our house, Dances with Wolves meets Pocahontas in Fern Gully, won three (Art Direction, Cinematography and Visual Effects), and I think this film should do at least as well. The director, grumpy Christopher Nolan, isn’t nominated so I don’t think it can take Best Picture.

THE FIGHTER

When Marky Mark became Mark Wahlberg and ditched his Calvin’s, he was making a very smart move. As a young man, Mr. Wahlberg was charged with attempted murder, pleaded guilty to assault, and was sentenced to two years in jail, of which he served 45 days. He’s obviously figured out how to channel all that aggression. I personally find Mark to be a very reliable actor. I even saw M.Night’s awful The Happening and while it was a really bad movie, Mark tried his best to make it work. Christian Bale is no softy either. It’s hard to believe he’s Australian after you see him in this movie. Melissa Leo has been a personal favorite of mine since her Homicide days. The big surprise in this cast is Amy Adams. But it’s another Boston Movie and the win for Scorcese’s The Departed was too recent for this to take Oscar home.

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

There are lots of complaints this year about how there are no Academy Award nominees of color but what about Lesbians? How long have they been neglected in Hollywood?
Alternative families are all around me in my neighborhood so I think it’s great that Hollywood finally caught on. I loved this movie and wrote about it in a earlier blog entitled: Gene pool, Cesspool—The Kids are All Right. I think Annette Bening should win for her performance but I don’t think the film has the technical or historical drama to carry the day.

If you would like to read more about this film and then some, please go to:

http://suburbanfamiliar.blogspot.com/2010/08/gene-pool-cesspool-kids-are-all-right.html

THE KINGS SPEECH

Colin Firth is completely adorable and is the closest to being named my make believe boyfriend of all the film nominees (Sorry George, but you’re not in a nominated film this year.) and so it would be really terrific if this movie wins. Geoffrey Rush is always brilliant and Helena Bonham Carter is absolutely my favorite. She’s beautiful and wacky. If she knew me, we would be great friends. It has the-real-story historical-person-faced-with-personal-adversity going for it. Also, a British accent gives this movie points because it makes everyone sound so such much more intelligent than most Americans even when they stammer.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

I like playing on Facebook so I’m not all that surprised that someone decided it would make great fodder for a film. Since this is the only movie nominated this year with a cast that includes minorities (How could you shoot at Harvard without Asians?) it gives this film, in an all white year, additional points. Aaron Sorkin is as smart as David Mamet and then some so while I haven’t seen the movie yet, I think it’s a real contender. By the way, if you haven’t seen the South Park episode about Facebook, you should.

TOY STORY 3

I love Woody. He’s the best male role model for young men out of Hollywood this year. He has heart, smarts and wears blue jeans without the sag. His buddy Buzz Lightyear shows how men can be friends without getting all soupy about it. It is a great celebration of Man-love of the highest order and the story and animation and performances are first rate. I’ve seen all three of these films and they just kept getting better and better, the opposite of most sequels (remember Godfather III?) and for that alone it should win something but since a friendship like this could only exist in cartoonland and Hollywood has never awarded an animated film the best picture award, the film makers will have to be content with best song -- because I love Randy Newman.

TRUE GRIT

The Coen brothers don’t want to win for this one so they won’t. They don’t want to become part of the Hollywood mainstream and even though this film has made more money than any other of their films, it was also rated PG-13. They seem to be more suited to R rated genre. I think they want to remain outside and edgy and we like them there.

WINTERS BONE

Since I live in the Northeast and have been snowed in and going stir crazy so there is no way I would vote for a film with Winter in the title. Ask me about this in the Spring, maybe after I’ve actually seen the movie and we don't have all this snow.

So that’s my rundown for this year’s Oscar Best Picture nominations. Please feel free to submit your own projections. Everyone can and does do it.

I got Cabin Fever!!

2011-01-23T19:01:00.000-05:00

Mommy is it summer yet?

My poor cat has cabin fever. In fact, she is so disoriented by the unnatural, glaring bright light of snow, that she sits at the doors leading to our great backyard and cries inconsolably. When a door is actually opened, she trots right up to the doorframe and she sees that -- Nope, not summer here. Defeated, she falls down to her tummy and rolls on to her side in pitiful submission. She looks as sorrowful and disappointed as a cat possibly can.

There is something both sad and hopeful in her behavior. Sad, because I don’t believe she really understands that we are going to be submerged in this snow for many more weeks. Even the seats of our backyard swings are hidden in the drifts and it’s only January. Yet it is hopeful too because she believes with all her little cat hopes, that one of us will soon open a door which leads to summer. She can then bask in the warmth of the sun in all her calico glory. She heats up like a fuzzy hot water bottle and then hides in the cool grass playing ferocious tigress with the bugs. She has already given up on the birds. They’re too fast. She is a lazy queen and a vicious bug hunter. It’s an interesting duality.

This morning I languished in bed with the cat, half listening to the radio, basically avoiding facing another frozen day. When the alarm goes off at my home, you never know where in the conversation you may enter. It’s tuned into an NPR station so it may be political, philosophical, or pop culture musings. This morning it was someone talking about the value of asking a politician running for office, which of their opponent’s ideas or platforms they most agree with. It was just a piece of the conversation that I arbitrarily entered but I’ve been walking around all day thinking about that snippet of audio. I am a big believer of things happening for a reason. I was meant to hear that snippet. So, all day long I thought about how well we understand one another and how important that really is.

If we were to ask those seeking office where they saw commonality with their opponents; wouldn’t it be an interesting way of seeing how reflective and articulate, how negotiable, how open they might be to discussion and compromise? Wouldn’t it also help us understand how well informed they were on their opponent’s position?

I do like the idea of knowing how far apart our leaders are --but I really like the idea of making sure our representatives really understand one another, at least as well as I understand my cat and her hopes for summer.

ABOUT FACE (Book)

2011-01-15T13:00:00.000-05:00

Our new obsession

It is a wondrous and curious thing to be part of a world where changes in technology dramatically and instantaneously impact how we live. Sometimes I feel like whoever is in charge has their foot on the accelerator and we are traveling faster and faster into an unknown and unknowable future. How would I ever be able to explain a cell phone or the Internet to my long gone and very gregarious Nana Sophie (who I do hope to see again in the next world…) or the new eCigarettes to her brother, my Great Uncle Milton, who never was without his trusty aromatic cigars?

Consider this; we recently gave my 82 year old mother a MAC and an internet service so she could watch the exercise videos her bone specialist has posted for Seniors on his website, as well as weekly updates and advice. This is, I would submit, the contemporary and future reconfiguration of paying house calls and providing rehabilitation services on-demand by the medical profession. It’s rather astonishing and efficient. Now if we could just get my mother to remember how to navigate to where we’ve put these bookmarks on her computer. It is clear that the Internet is for the young and more intellectually flexible.

Young Person of the Year

As proof, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, a very young man, wears the mantle of Time Magazine’s Person of the Year because of his electronic creation, Facebook. Clearly this phenomenon has expanded and confounded the notion of friendship. Facebook friendships may or may not be with your closest friends. (I have several near and dear who continue to avoid this site like the plague.) Facebook friendships may or may not reconnect you with people from your past. It has made it easier to maintain and establish connections with others, with people you may remember fondly and with people who were a part of your life when you and they lived or worked nearby or together; even with the people next door. It’s all how you choose to play on the Facebook playground.

For example, a simple press of the button indicating you like something someone else has posted gives the recipient an acknowledgment, as in --you matter to me. A lovely and easy way to show --I value what you value; a what makes you feel good makes me happy – and I think that’s a good thing. We generally don’t give ourselves enough pats on the back for what we accomplish. Now we can provide them for others in an instant.

"Poke your Grandma, Kyle" Classic irreverent South Park
You have 0 friends -- Season 12 Episode 12

I also like the poking feature. It’s a way of playing tag on Facebook’s Playground, the most egalitarian game ever invented and you can play this kind of tag all day long and never get tired or winded.

Danger Zone

For a while, I was really caught up playing Farmville, gifting my cyberneighbors with cows and trees and planting and harvesting crops to optimize their yield and value. Once I had amassed over $2 million Farmville dollars, it all become rather pointless to me. It stopped being fun spending money on virtual things. I abandoned my farm, but no animals were actually harmed in my doing so.

I briefly waited tables and served up a bizarre menu of choices in Cafeville and then became part of Yo-ville, a real-time interactive social game where you can eventually inhabit a palatial estate, wear the hippest clothes and continuously redecorate your pad. Along the way you can shop and tour the town, interacting with strangers and admiring their sense of style, visiting the homes of friends and in general just be an electronically social person. You could do all this while still sitting on your couch, wearing your pajamas.

Help me, Dr. Drew

All of this pointless activity became the great black sinkhole of Facebook and I found myself fallen like Alice, into a new make-believe world from which there seemed no escape. Clearly I had to wean myself off of these games and find a more productive use of my electronic time. I had to admit to myself, I was addicted. Could I possibly need to check in with Dr. Drew? (Would I get to meet the golden-throated Ted Williams, formerly homeless beggar, who has so much to come clean for, but appears destined to fail?) I have to confess, I am a visual junkie. If it moves, I’ll watch it. That’s not to say that I don’t have taste or a critical eye. I am selective, but initially easily seduced.

The result of this withdrawal is what you see before you – this blog. I decided that I certainly might be a entertaining as earning a virtual cow or serving virtual spaghetti, at least I hope so! I’ve also learned to pepper my words with pictures that I hope provide my readers with respite from my ramblings. Facebook now serves as one of the major portals to my very own imaginary electronic playspace. Thanks to you, my readers, who come week after week to play on my playground.

Tag, you’re it.

I is learning

2011-01-12T15:41:00.000-05:00

Makes me think and laugh

I have not wanted to post a new blog this week because I’ve been too overwhelmed by the events in the world around me. I felt the need to let things settle down a bit before I chose to be reflective, as is my wont. Initially my dismay was local in nature but after this weekend the events in Arizona make the local crisis pale in comparison. It is just a very sad, senseless tragedy. I cannot possibly be as eloquent as John Stewart was on Monday evening’s broadcast so I direct my readers to his website to see for themselves. (As an added bonus, stay tuned for his interview with the wonderful Denis Leary.)

http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/mon-january-10-2011-denis-leary

Makes me laugh and think

For those of you who reside beyond the parameters of Montclair New Jersey, this is perhaps not of immediate interest but I ask you to read on and have faith. This is about all of us and our future. My fellow townies may be as dismayed as I by the proposed (dare I utter it) closing of two schools in our district due to very real budget constraints. The estimated shortfall in our town is in the $6 million range. The problem locally is compounded by problems in the state and our newly elected Governor Chris Christie.

Before you stop reading here because you assume that left-of-center I will embark on a tirade lambasting Christie's policies, his politics, his vacation in Disneyworld, you may be surprised by my more measured and hopefully thoughtful response. Governor Christie has inherited the mess that is public education in New Jersey.

I would first say that I am greatly dismayed by the tone of the conversation this debate about public education has taken both locally and nationally. Civility please. But somehow it seems to be OK for the general population to be treated and spoken to as if we were ignoramuses, incapable of understanding the complexities of bureaucracies, the complexities of education. We are spoken to as though we will naively accept sound bites as panaceas to problems in public education that have existed for decades and require innovation, leadership, scholarship and an exposure to public scrutiny unparalleled in public education’s history.
That is a big part of the problem. Most people, who work in the education world are unprepared for, even offended by those who dare to encroach on their playing field. Many believe the public cannot possibly understand what life in a classroom means. I understand their dismay. Those who are on the front line, the classroom teachers in particular, are being treated just like the poor and middle classes are being treated by our new Congress. They are being made powerless again. They are being held accountable for failures that begin at home, in a bloated, outmoded system they didn't create.

One need look no further than the disastrous No Child Left Behind legislation, created with NOT one classroom teacher on the advisory committee. This legislation written by a crew of Bush cronies in the Educational Publishing world wastes millions of taxpayer’s dollars every single year. There is no national standard or oversight. AYP (Annual Yearly Progress) is measured differently in each state. An eighth grader in Texas performing at an advanced proficiency level in Language Arts is not performing at the same level as an advanced student in New Jersey; which has one of the most difficult tests. So what are we actually measuring? Is anyone paying attention? How can we possibly suggest that this is somehow a measure of a classroom teacher’s performance?

Education is our Future, writ large.
Why should we have less than the best?

There’s also another way to look at this situation in the muddled state of New Jersey. First let’s talk about the way the state public education is structured in this state. New Jersey is ranked 9th in population with, according to the 2010 Census, 8.4 million residents. The 10th ranked state and closest to New Jersey’s count is Georgia with 8.2 million residents. Now consider this fact. The state of New Jersey has 601 School Districts, each with it’s own superintendent earning at least $125, 000 a year plus benefits. Our own earns over $200,000. Districts are basically towns so while Newark has a superintendent overseeing 39,440 public school students, a town like Essex Fells also has one with less than 1200 students, which is less than the number of student’s in Montclair High School. That represents $75,000,000 a year in salaries alone for just the superintendents. Georgia, with a slightly lower population, has 182 districts or about $23,000,000 in salaries to perform the same job that is done in New Jersey. Does it make sense that we spend at least $50,000,000 more for a overseeing comparable number of students?
Yet the discussion locally as well as in the news about the state is the focused on the pension and salaries of teachers. I understand that Christie recently fired 7 county superintendents, another layer on top of the district superintendents and that seems like a smart move to me. That decision represented another estimated $1,000,000 in salaries alone per year paid by taxpayers in New Jersey.

We don’t need more layers; we need the best teachers in our classrooms being lead by the very best principals with smart and innovative superintendents. But do we really need three times as many Superintendents in this state as Georgia?
The cost of public education does need to come down, property taxes are ridiculous in this state, but shouldn’t we be having conversations about the structure of the system in this state? If sacrifices and cuts are to be made, shouldn’t we examine the whole system from top to bottom? I’m not singling anyone out in this. I’m not suggesting that Superintendents aren’t needed -- but at $50 MILLION dollars more per year than Georgia? Really?

Baby it's Cold Outside

2011-01-01T09:40:00.000-05:00

20 inches fell on my house.

Welcome in the new decade and au revoir and good riddance to the last. To my readers on the Northeastern Shores, permit me to apologize. When I posted my previous blog, Let it (gasp!) Snow, it was not my intention to cause enough snow for an entire season to plop down upon us in one fell swoop. Whoever is in charge of this, if you are reading my blog, up there or wherever you are, please don’t take my words so literally; a dusting, a lovely slender white blanket would have been sufficient.

That said, the advantages of having a-stuck-at-home snowstorms are several. First, I had the chance to spend a ridiculous amount of time and money on iTunes and the Sony Music site. Music is much too important to ignore. It’s a curious thing, selecting which songs and artists to focus on, which to preview, and which tunes are really critical to add to my repertoire. I added over 75 songs but it hardly seems like enough.

For my own listening pleasure, I added some John Legend, Beatles (!) and yes; I’ll admit it, some Glee renditions. Don’t hate me because I like Glee. I’m a Gleek. First, because I know every single song they sing on this show from today and yesterday. Music and especially their lyrics were always a passion of mine. In my next life, I’m coming back as a show tune lyricist. I’ve even written several potential Pop Culture ditties over the years.

This first sampling comes from an idea I have –

Steve Jobs: The Musical

“Why do all computers only come in White?”

Why do all computers only come in white,

Doesn’t Apple understand my decorator’s plight?

I’ve got Ivory in my living room

and Ecru in the den --

White’s just too restrictive-- coordinating them.

My kitchen keeps it’s kitsch ware,

with my stove in Harvest Gold.

How can I access Cooks dot com

without my laptop there?

Or my bow to the scandals that make Hollywood entitled –

“Moguls on Moguls”

That's pronounced LAWN-JAY

It’s the latest, Hollywood, place to be

On the slopes of the Rockies --- playing Jean-Claude Killy –

For it’s all of the things, that Hollywood, craves --

The fashion, the powder, even Claudine Longet*

Who high on the white stuff, blew her boyfriend away

For these Moguls -- on Moguls

Compete in a sport

In which box office tallies –

are what they report.

*Actress/Singer Claudine Longet shot and accidently

killed boyfriend “Spider” Sabich in Aspen back in 1976.

Google it for the alleged details.

I have others as well – but I’ll save them for another blog.

Back to Glee -- Second, the singers on Glee have great voices, many from the world of Broadway. I also think that while the characters are pretty one dimensional, Sue and Brittany have some of the funniest lines on TV.

As a girl from New Jersey, music from the Garden State is one of the best things about it. For years I lived with the --“ Oh yeah? What exit?” punch line -- as in you live in New Jersey what exit? I never particularly took offense at this throwaway line because the pragmatic side of me knew that in fact, both the Turnpike and The Garden State Parkway stretch in large measure, from stem to stern, the bulk of the state. The exit numbers indicated from either of these roadways does indeed provide a not imprecise indication of where in the state you may be heading or leaving.

Further, if all the jokes gave the impression that New Jersey was a state full of highways and industrialized hotspots – so much the better for the rest of us who understood the gentle rolling hills and greener pastures that lay beyond. Stay away then and leave the good parts to us.

BRUUUCE!

But the Jersey-as-joke material cooled down significantly with the rise of the magnificent Springsteen. Surely he embodied that all could not be wrong in this much-maligned state. The plaintive voice of this workingman’s travails with his ironed blue collar possessed a diction, intelligence and sound of the poet that has never been needed so much as now. I will even throw in Bon Jovi who while not (IMHO) in the same artistic league as Bruce, was the world’s top-earning concert act last year. He made half of his $200 million in ticket revenue from shows outside North America. Just another fine example of why music provides another perspective on us kids from Joisey.

I say this as I move into harangue mode, this time directed at those who have chosen to ridicule my fellow inhabitants with shows like Jerseylicious, The Jersey Shore, and Housewives from New Jersey. The New Years stunt with little Pumpkin Spice, aka Snookie, in the hamster ball did not help things either. These tanning booth and big hair bimbos on parade are not real to me. As a resident of this state for over 45 years I can honestly say that I don’t personally know anyone who resembles anyone in any way, shape, or form close to the characters on these shows. They are completely foreign and exotic creatures to me.

Of course, the other thing to consider is that one of the most highbrow shows on television, the cerebral, yet stylish and violent Boardwalk Empire, takes place in New Jersey as well, albeit at another time. It may not show my fellow Jerseyans in the best light, but it sure shows them in the best lighting.

So Ha ha ha, to all the naysayers. New Jersey rocks! Stop picking on us and get that garbage off the air.

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Let it (gasp!) Snow.

2010-12-24T22:26:00.000-05:00

My salute to the season must include a reflection of the white stuff because “The Holidays Thing” means only congested shops and too much food in our household. We’re not the organized religion types but admire those who do indulge, whatever their proclivities. It also signals less light and the onset of our collective Seasonal Affective Disorder, also known as S.A.D. when our family takes turns sitting in front of a light every morning to soak in rays we sadly, literally and figuratively, miss.

The diminishing light of day that comes with this season at one time in my life meant only one thing to a former paramour and I -- the attendant arrival of snow. Our lives at that time, while others might have been building families or resume points or businesses, were consumed by our days on the slope. It commenced with short weekend trips in late fall to Stratton, Vermont; then Christmas week in Stowe, followed a late winter trip north to Canada and the season closed with an extended Spring visit out West or to Europe. On average, we spent at least 40 to 50 days a season in ski gear. While I spent many days on the slope during those years, I never became an expert skier; at best I was an emerging intermediate.

My companion in those days approached skiing as a sport, I as a leisure time activity. This meant that for every hour we spent skiing together, we spent two skiing apart. He chose the slopes to challenge, I chose the slopes to daydream in a silence that only comes from a wide lonesome white trail surrounded by trees glistening in soft sunlight and the crisp clack of ski blades as you swayed from side to side. It was hypnotic and peaceful and achieving a particular grace that drove me forward.

This blissful state was like dancing alone to music only you can hear. I have had the good fortune to ski on some of the most beautiful mountains in the world under the most glorious conditions and for that I am eternally grateful. But snow is a fickle mistress for she can change and alter her character in an instant and she is inconstant and can be cruel.

Not for the faint of heart.

The best example of her range of character was demonstrated by two remarkable experiences. The first took place in Zermatt, Switzerland. Zermatt is a village high in the Swiss Alps at the foot of Switzerland’s highest Mountains and borders Italy. If you take the bullet train or funicular railway followed by a gondola ride, which runs up and through the magnificent Matterhorn, you can actually ski into Italy for lunch and you need to carry your passport to get back into Switzerland.

Ya, Der Matterhorn is Incredible.

The village itself was something you might expect to see in Shirley Temple’s Heidi or imagine when reading The Snow Queen or at some imagined fabulous display from childhood at FAO Scwarz. Quaint chalet homes dot the base of the mountain, milk and food carts are wheeled around town, stores carry cuckoo clocks and watches, and the local residents speak German. When I vacationed there, the only mode of transportation was sleigh or foot. No cars or combustible engines of any sort were permitted. The old fashioned train from Bern (with two transfers) took you right into the center of this timeless village where a sleigh from the hotel loaded with blankets carried you off in style to your hotel. Today there are a few electric cars, which ferry visitors to the base of the slopes.

On this particular late morning, I had gotten completely turned around and found myself alone at the top of a double diamond trail. For the ski novitiate, that means an advanced expert trail. I was not at that point particularly thrilled by the actual ski conditions of Zermatt since it included Glacier warnings and snow that had the consistency of large pebbles made of ice. When you were a relatively flat-footed skier, (i.e. not advanced enough to consistently ski on edges) skiing down these trails was akin to riding in a little red wagon on an unpaved country road – yeah, not so much fun. But there were stretches in wide basins of hard packed powder and the scenery was breathtaking. Anyway, there I was alone on this expert trail marked with double diamonds because of the steep moguls, which dotted its descent. These moguls, or sharp crested hills, were taller than I and covered in ice. I inched slowly over to the tree line and noticed as I stretched my neck out precariously out and over the first cliff, were a slew of small white crosses dotting the hillside all along the tree line. Hmm. What the hell??

There was no turning back according to the map in fanny sack. This was it. So, I daintily removed my skis, hoisted them over my shoulder and spent the next two hours slipping, falling and sliding down the trail and crying and muttering under my breath in anticipation of my final life encounter with Herr Peepercorn. Herr P is a character from Thomas Mann’s, The Magic Mountain, (An amazing book requiring the patience of Job but well worth it…) the embodiment of Tragedy and Dionysian or our dark experiences of the world, both representing God and not. For Hans, the protagonist in the novel, it is his final encounter, his choice to be healed or not. For me, what were these white crosses but markings of those who had died making this same journey as I in years past? Great, I thought, I’m going to die alone in the Alps with the miniature Nazis (the rudest little ones in the world) who spent the morning skiing across my skis while I stood on the lift lines, mocking my choice to ski on their mountain. Ju? Ya, Ju.

As I made my way to the bottom of the trail, a fellow skier appeared and took pity on me. He picked up my skies and carried them down the trail, assisting as best he could in broken English and once safely on level ground pointed out a lovely chalet in the distance where he assured me, I could find some nice vino to calm my nerves. I put my skies back on and skated across an ice-covered plain to one of the lovely chalet restaurants that dot the mountainside where I had some fresh pasta and half a bottle of red wine. My descent back to the village over a long bumpy uncomfortable stretch was completed in record time. I kept my knees bent, my head tucked into my shoulders and shoulders forward. I made it to town, removed my skies, hiked back to my elegant hotel where I crawled under the down quilt in my sleigh bed in the fancy cherry paneled suite and did not move until it was time to dress for dinner. My conclusion: Only Nazis could love that mountain.

On the other hand, snow could provide a very different kind of oblivion, one that provided a state of bliss never experienced before or experienced again. It was a rare moment of self-submission when I allowed myself to trust in the unknown. I was all-alone, skiing down a deep wide bowl in Aspen in late February. There is nothing like skiing in the West. It was a long and wide beginners trail and I just wanted to relax after a long day of challenges. The trail was deserted in the low, late, afternoon sun, which flattened the landscape. That wonderful whoosh of my skis moving side to side against the silent gentle powder was glorious; the languid swaying side to side, like dancing. I was never a great athlete, but the forgiving nature of Western snow and the shear majesty of the trails emboldens the most timid of athletes.

Buttermilk Mountain in Aspen will spoil you for life.

All at one the sky was filled with snow. I was unable to see even six inches in front of my nose. But rather than panic, a voice inside told me to press on. I was experiencing my first white-out. I had been told about these experiences. It was extraordinary as each shimmering flake fell in and out of my field of vision and unending layers upon layers of magical frozen crystals fell from above, one replacing the next. It was all I could see.

There was no sound but a joy unlike any I had experienced before came from deep within. I felt like I was being embraced in some Pantheistic rapture, smitten with a reckless abandon, sure I was safe in the fickle frozen arms of nature. It may have lasted three minutes or twenty. I don’t know, but it was a singular moment of perfect happiness.

So, bring it on and let it snow.

And Happy Holidays to you and yours, no matter how you choose to celebrate.

Civility and Discourse

2010-12-13T14:26:00.000-05:00

Sadly, not true for everyone.

It’s Thursday and I’m back in a Special Ed self-contained Language Arts classroom starting my day off with three adorable ten-year-old children who struggle in varying degrees with reading. It is fascinating to see words being read accurately but not being retained or processed, as though each had wings, which lift them off of the page once uttered.

Recall always needs to be prompted, even when it is factual information on three or four pages with pictures and no more than four or five sentences on each page. What is it about these young minds that have inhibited their abilities to use their short-term memory skills effectively?

There are many theories as to why particular children may suffer with this processing deficiency and there are no quick fixes. To work as a teacher with these children requires great patience, compassion and understanding. It requires most of all, a great ability to listen. There is little nuance, little passion in their renderings, no matter how remarkable the content. I am saddened for their loss, for what they may never understand about words.

Later today we will be playing a board game called FACT OR OPINION. We have played it before. I made a chart distinguishing the characteristics of facts from opinions to scaffold learning. Sometimes they remember to refer to it, and sometimes not. The children are eager to please and often call out an answer without reflecting. They are conditioned to treat learning as a competitive, as a race. It’s hard not to fall into that trap but I try to encourage them by asking not only for their answers but their reasons as well. This helps to slow them down to deliberate and consider.

Is this necessary?

I share this because I often wish our public discourse provided leaders who act as I must, who in the course of law making and breaking to consider, reflex and measure their words before they spoke instead of racing to the media microphone to be the first one to respond. I would also like to know more about their processes of comprehension. Are they good, thorough readers? How about their staff that must wade through the morass of legislation and paperwork and then advise their bosses? Have they examined the facts vs. the opinions, which surround the legislation they create and uphold?

Reading is the most difficult task we master. It is not hard wired into our brain for our survival. There is no single part of the brain that helps us read. We must go from learning to speak to learning to apply our language skills to a somewhat arbitrary collection of symbols for which there are more exceptions than rules. Daunting when you think about it.

In our home on Sundays we always try to watch The McLaughlin Group. We used to call it The Yelling Show because this public affairs program, which has been on the air since 1982, features speakers from the left and the right with Dr. John McLaughlin in the middle. He has a Ph.D. from Columbia, the School of Journalism, not the correspondence school of broadcasting. He asks questions for which he has an opinion, frequently right of center and allows his panel to go at it. It is unrehearsed and taped live and that makes for both lively conversation and frequent interruptions.

If John feels the panelist has not adequately answered the question, he probes further acting as a kind of Socrates to his panelists, in pursuit of what he deems as truth, not necessarily reflecting his opinion per se. His pronouncements and gravely voice and stentorian tone make for entertaining television.

His most recent participants include on the right, Pat Buchanan and Monica Crowley. Both are also Ph.D.’s from Columbia. Pat from the school of Journalism and Monica in International Relations. Pat was also a presidential candidate in 1992, 1996 and 2000 in case you forgot. He was also the Director of White House Communication for two years under Reagan and acted as an advisor to Nixon and Ford. Monica, a Fox News Contributor and Radio Host, began her career as a young advisor to Nixon to whom she sent fan mail as a grad student. Monica usually wears 6-inch heels and a short skirt. She is a blond and smirks.

On the left is Eleanor Clift, a contributing editor to Newsweek Magazine who covered the White House beat under Clinton as well as Hillary's run for the New York Senate. Her first husband ( who died ) was the brother of actor Montgomery Clift -- in case any of you like your news delivered with a People Magazine Pop Culture sensibility as I frequently do.

She worked her way up from the Secretarial pool at Newsweek, the first woman to do so and she is a good sport about the ribbing she frequently receives. She’s the one in the sensible shoes.

Most recently Mort Zuckerman is by her side. Owner of the New York Daily News, Editor in Chief of US News and World Report and known for his philanthropic ways (He recently recommitted to make good the $30 million lost by investment with Mr. Madoff made by his local synagogue -- a mench one might say. ) Though sometimes The engaging Chicago columnist Clarence Page fills in on the left.

Here’s the thing, first I’ve noticed a change in the timbre of the conversation. It’s more civilized these days. The panelists are more polite to one another and there’s more agreement about how to move forward. I like it. I need to listen to real conversations and not sound bites. Now, I’m not suggesting that this single show is the end all. Frequently the conversations barely scrape the surface but the platitudes and careless words seem to appear less than on other shows --even when I don’t agree and want to smack the smirk off of Monica’s face.

Second, their two or three end of the year shows are the best conversations on Television. John will ask for their candidates for the smartest politician or the one who went down in flames or the most original thinker of the year and always concludes with asking for predictions. Even if you watch for the next two weekends, you’ll get the best without the mud slinging and designed for sound bite responses.

The Death of Socrates
by Jacques Louis-David

I hope our county’s leaders take some heed from this little weekly show. We are in dire need of real conversation, of discussing the facts and moving away from opinion and partisan politics. We must be able to count on our politicians to be good readers to be able to move forward into our new century with a clear vision for what might be.

As Socrates said,

“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.”

In other words, read.

Compassion or Charlie Brown, You’re a Good Man

2010-11-28T19:56:00.000-05:00

How I loved them all.

We were ever hopeful.

In 1950 a shy guy from Minnesota by the name of Charles M. Schultz published a cartoon strip and rocked the daily cartoon world to its very core. For the first time a comic strip examined the interior lives of children who weren’t always happy in a world in which problems were not solved. This was no mischievous “Katzenjammer Kids” or “Little Orphan Annie” with her annoying endless pluck. “Peanuts” embodied by round-headed Charlie Brown, changed how we looked at children, ever after.

Lucy never stopped tormenting Charlie through his football. In spite and in good measure perhaps, her pursuit of the temperamental musician Schroeder was never fulfilled. Fearful yet moral Linus couldn’t give up his security blanket. Snoopy used his Ace Pilot fantasy to fulfill his species-limited aspirations and Charlie Brown could never connect with his little red-haired girl. How fitting that Lucy set up court as the psychiatrist who didn’t help because she, pretending to be an adult, never listened. Rather than poke fun or belittle the hurts, fears and pains of childhood, Mr. Schultz honored them and in doing so, captured my heart and hearts of millions of baby boomers everywhere.

The adults who populated this world in the charming television adaptations later produced by Mr. Schultz, were heard only as gibberish or honks to which the children responded to as sources of humiliation, rejection or exasperation. They never helped.

Those crazy Katzenjammers!

There was a time in my life when I was not blessed with good health and as a part of my recovery process it was necessary for me to take a test, which measured my metabolism and was somewhat barbaric. Over the course of about 9 months I went to the doctor’s office once every month in the morning and lay down on an examination table. The lights were then turned down low and I had to remain still for about an hour. Once that time had passed, a large machine was wheeled into the room and I had to insert a breathing tube filled with fresh oxygen that had a rubber mouthpiece, which I wore for another 20 minutes or so and measured my metabolic rate. I was 12 years old. Today that test is long gone. There are much more efficient ways to determine if your thyroid is functioning properly.

It wasn’t invasive so much as disconcerting and uncomfortable and when the test was over I usually went to IHOP with my father, for he was assigned this task, for their Pancakes with boysenberry syrup. I always felt rather fragile after the test and ravenously hungry. On one of these occasions, instead of the IHOP in Millburn, my father took me to a coffee shop in South Orange Village. I remember that he needed to pick something up from one of his business associates nearby.

Death Eater Pose

We were seated in a booth by the window awaiting our food when an elderly gentleman entered. In some ways this character looked like a Death Eater from Harry Potter. His dark coat was tattered and hung off of his gaunt frame. He wore a knit cap and he seemed to carry about his person a dark and undefined dusky aura. His face was bearded and surrounded by a wild white halo that looked evenly trimmed as with a scissor, but was much too long. When he sat down at the counter of the coffee shop I was taken aback. I had never seen an elderly person is such disarray or reflecting such a forlorn and poverty stricken position in life. He took out a baby food jar from a pocket on the inside of his coat, twisted off the lid, and starting counting out coins, mostly quarters, on the counter. The waitress came over and he began to order with gusto. He was directly in my line of vision and I gasped and started to cry. My father noticed my tears and turned around to see what I was looking at.

He looked back at me and started to laugh. “Oh, I bet he’s getting some pancakes today too with all that money. Looks like he’s loaded.” And he continued to laugh, as though my compassion, my sorrow, was a silly thing.

The waitress delivered our food and I was unable to eat. It just angered my father, the fact that I was wasting good food, wasting his money. He told me to not be so damn sensitive. I did not yet know the term – “There but for the grace of God, go I” --but I clearly felt it in that most fragile moment. I was just frightened by what I saw and did not know how to articulate those feelings but Charles M. Schultz did. He understood how vulnerable and alone children felt when the adults around them didn’t know how to listen or help or chase away their fears.

I am ever thankful for them

As we pass through this time of Thanksgiving, I cannot think of a better time to consider our own reality, how we could have walked the same path as those which we are so quick to judge and be thankful for all that we have been given, most especially Charlie Brown and friends.

THE SUMMER OF LOVE

2010-11-23T17:11:00.000-05:00

Hippie Art!

It swept across the country from Haight-Ashbury in the summer of 1967. Aretha called for Respect, Jim Morrison wanted his fire lit. And Van Morrison sang to me, his brown-eyed girl. No one was immune, the music was just too damn good and the truth was found to be lies. It was the summer I fell deeply, madly in love with a boy at our swim club.

He was the son of a beautiful tall, bronzed brunette Italian mother with the ripe features of a Sophia Loren and a short Jewish father in the wholesale meat business who resembled a frog and not Kermit. His older brother looked like the father and he, the object of my young obsession, took after his mother. He had dark blonde curly hair, an olive complexion, wide shoulders, a full sensuous mouth and he played the drums. (Collective sigh -- now.) All that was missing were the flowers in his hair. I had seen him perform in a Battle of the Bands at the swim club junior dance and was from that moment, gone. I was just 14 years old. He was 16.

Adonis

There was enough of an age gap at that time, compounded by my immaturity and his maturity, that the gulf between us was too wide. For two summers I just gazed with wonder at this fine specimen of young manhood with his beautiful clear skin, his sparkling golden eyes and sun bleached curls and felt absolutely worthless. He was my Adonis. And in fact, might as well have lived on Mt. Olympus for all the interaction that took place between us -- precisely none.

I was a big swimmer in those days at a swim club that held dances and parties and had a fantastic day camp we attended for years. Monday through Saturday, Mothers with children in tow, came to the Club, had lunch and then delivered the children to the camp gates for the afternoon. The property was a rolling-hilled and rambling old dairy farm of about 300 acres and the youngest children all gathered in a huge red barn with a silo. Their camp area was fenced in with deep soft sandboxes filled with toys, a large toddler pool with a little fountain and wide wooden swings. There were large expanses of rolling grassy areas populated by ancient towering trees that provided ample shade.

The older children, the ones ready for competitive sports, had the run of the larger day camp area which was about 25 acres. Centrally located were 3 full-sized basketball courts surrounded on three sides by a grassy hill where groups of children sorted by age gathered with their counselors at the beginning and end of each day. There were freshly mowed fields on open acres for running and jumping and just being kids. There were 4 softball/kickball fields, an Arts and Crafts dome, a Music Dome, a smaller swimming pool for daily lessons, covered areas for games in inclement weather, and for the oldest campers, a place for cookouts, when marshmallows were roasted in the lightening-bug filled twilight hours, when Color War activities extended our days.

While the children were in camp, weaving lanyards, playing sports, rehearsing the annual musical, and eating double stick ice pops that you could split and trade flavors with friends; the mothers played tennis or mahjong and watched fashion shows on the weekends where the models, strolled from cabana to cabana in the latest designer cruise and swimwear holding discrete tags with price information.

On the weekends the Fathers appeared and played paddleball and tennis or cards while the children and mothers baked at the pool and took their various lessons. Gracious members had small refrigerators in their cabanas stocked with ice and juices for mixing cocktails at their own bar. Drinks were served all day long. The club members were a tanned and fit, boisterous group of upper middle class Jews who were successful in a wide variety of businesses. This was not a collection of well-educated intellectuals though some were Doctors and Lawyers and most had attended or graduated from college; these were the young marrieds who were riding the crest of prosperity ushered in with the booming sixties. These were the sons of family owned businesses in the garment center, in the fur business, in the diamond district, and the manufacturing of auto parts and accessories. They smoked and drank and enjoyed flirting with one another’s spouses.

My family had a large cabana with a private shower and dressing room in a row with families they spent every summer with. The club layout had 4 tiered and distinct areas with lockers and cabanas that were rented season after season by the same families. The open area had another baby pool with a fountain and play park for infants, a large restaurant with great ice cream and burgers and fries that probably could seat 250 diners, 9 tennis courts, 9 paddle ball courts, 3 paddle tennis courts and teen area with a juke box and dance floor.

When you entered this wonderful club there was a huge raised slate patio used for Saturday night adult dances and Sunday family movie nights. My first movie under the stars was a special screening of “Bye Bye Birdie” which we all watched eating ice cream cones in our pajamas.

The Hoff

But the true treasure, the greatest thing this club had was it’s amazing pool. It was a double Olympic sized pool with a low and high diving board, meticulously maintained by a large crew of zinc nosed lifeguards in red suits, long before Baywatch enshrined the look. They were perched in 6 elevated stations around the perimeter of this always shimmering, always perfect, always welcoming glorious pool. There was nowhere else in the world that made me happier. I would swim underwater the width, and eventually the length of this private wonderful world. Down to the bottom and up again--sometimes tossing coins to retrieve, sometimes just pretending to do it, just for an excuse to be submerged in the warmth and sparkle of summer sunlight diffused by the subtle lap of the water.

Handsome, garrulous, tanned young men, home for the summer from good Northeastern colleges worked at the front gate parking cars and flirting with the prettiest girls. The next tier down on the social pecking order were the cabana boys, dressed in their blue and white club tee shirts and shorts, who swung their master keys and sat on deck chairs stationed throughout the club helping the little kids who would get locked out, or in, of their closet sized lockers and flirting with the mothers and their daughters as they emerged from their lockers in the latest swimwear.

I spent an entire summer in the company of a Dartmouth sophomore when I was 14, while the other mothers at the club clucked about it. My own was oblivious. I even overheard them talking about me one day --- “Well if she had a proper role model” and “if her father just paid her the slightest attention, she wouldn’t be looking for approval from Bobby ” -- my much too old for me, Cabana Boy. Just thoughtless remarks made by thoughtless people and overheard by a much too sensitive girl. But what they didn’t understand was that he was my practice boyfriend and there was no danger of anything ever happening. My real boyfriend was the one with whom I never exchanged a word. It was after all, the Summer of Love.

Ya gotta have friends, not Real Housewives.

2010-11-14T09:49:00.000-05:00

My deepest wish is for good, honest, compassionate, loyal, clever, and empathetic friends for my offspring - is this too much to ask? Based on what I see on Reality Television and the participants on programs designed for teens, I am doubtful. It seems the whole world has taken on entitlement and ignorance as their theme. I find it maddening.

Soon to be Exes

What has particularly stuck in my craw this week is the whole Real Housewives Genre, if one can call it that. I am specifically annoyed by the complaints of Mrs. Camille Grammer, soon to be former wife of Kelsey. I would like to confess that I have not actually seen any of these shows, will not watch them at anytime in the near future and nothing will convince me that they will provide anything my life is presently or will ever be missing. But apparently someone is watching them, otherwise why would there be so many iterations? (For the record, entering it’s 6^th Season is Orange County, followed by New York City, Atlanta, New Jersey, D.C., Beverly Hills, and apparently the soon to be aired Miami version.)

Let me also add that everything I am objecting to comes from what I have read on the internet or seen on the same in a variety of video clips. Me thinks the woman doth protesteth too much and should keepeth her mouth closed.

Camille is a former Playboy model, Club MTV dancer and obvious recipient of silicone enhancements, none of which I object to but when she says she is a very private person and objects to the media spotlight shinning on her crumbling marriage, I gotta say “What the ?? “ So prancing around and being photographed NAKED is an attribute of those who seek privacy?

So Camille, I ask you, having witnessed the crumbling of marriages exposed to the scrutiny of the television camera since Chicken-of-the-Sea Jessica -- didn’t give you a clue as to what might happen when you signed up for this “Real” gig?

Is it Chicken Jessica

Kelsey has made a career by playing pompous, unsympathetic, narcissistic, pontificating, unactualized men since he sat on a bar stool in “Cheers”. His latest role, on Broadway, in the very boring "La Cage aux Folles" is no different. He plays a gay man as conceived by this straight

Jerry & his Drag Queens
Mame & Dolly

man -- singing poorly, much like Rex Harrison's Henry Higgins without the charm -- the dullest collection of Jerry Herman songs ever written. Mr. Herman has had an astonishing career on Broadway creating shows about drag queens even when the parts were played by women.

And now, poor Camille, calls him “needy” and “a big baby”. He’s an actor for gods’ sake! What did you expect?

I just wanna be
loved

So Camille, you protest that Kelsey persuaded you that little Bravo* TV would be a great place to show off your "talents" ? Bravo would be a good place to expose the fact that your two children have four nannies or to make public that you actually chose not to bear the children, but used a surrogate so as not to stretch yourself both literally and figuratively? Don’t you think your children will be delighted that you will be sharing this with the world on the set of a Reality TV show?

*Readers, this is the network that lost “Project Runway” and tried to duplicate its success with the completely unwatchable “The Fashion Show” with the haughty Iman and drooling Isaac Mizrahi. Pu-lease! Has anyone else tried to watch this cringe inducing nasty bitch fest?

Oksana before the lips
were added

Snooki and her bumps

I know I'm not the only one who finds women like Camille embarrassing. Bimbos embarrass me. You, Camille make Oksana and Snooki look deep and soulful.

Living a Life Half Full

2010-11-11T21:56:00.000-05:00

I'm feeling a bit of the mid-term election blues and have decided to repost one of my favorites and short and sweet musings. I hope this helps.

The thoughtful Anne

I have the distinction of sharing a birthday with Anne Frank, author of the best selling work of non-fiction in the world so my bar is set rather high on the successful writer meter. I'd like to think that Anne and I share more than birthdays, that we share an unchanging belief in the inherent goodness of people, in spite of the raw deals we may have been dealt; hers certainly more catastrophic than my own.

There is somehow a great responsibility levied with this common link and I am not alone in considering the birth date of June 12 as somehow significant.

The Thoughtful Phillip

Phillip Roth's life-long obsession with Ms. Frank was in some measure what drove his pursuit of Claire Bloom, another June 12 Jewess. Surely she, in spite of Mr. Roth's brilliantly documented proclivity to fester in the dark side, must have believed that underneath his embittered vowels and Jewish self-loathing; must be a spark of the joy that is life. Surely she was an optimist, like Anne, in spite of the mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Lovely Claire

If I examine my life on the world stage I am challenged to remain hopeful and positive. The relentless 24 hour News feed is enough to crush the spirits of the most blindly optimistic. Even reduced down to the small village raising my child, I have moments of despair. And yet in spite of those moments I chose to bring a child into this world.

I made this decision as a full-fledged adult of 40 in spite of not having the best role models (but who does?), to prepare me for this never-ending responsibility. This life-affirming step requires a belief in some kind of future, in some kind of ever-after.

Whether it is science or religion, Einstein famously opined that these two things were connected; each requiring a leap of faith, a leap into the unknowable. I would have included Parenthood as well.

In choosing to become a parent are we not conveying a necessary optimism, a belief that our world is worth entering --- in spite of the mountains of evidence to the contrary?

PEN-Faulkner Award

National Book Critics
Award Winner

Pulitzer Prize Winner

Just a few of his little books…oh, to write just one.

Suburban Familiar: You will read what you sow.

2010-11-06T11:28:00.000-04:00

Suburban Familiar: Mad about the original MAD men.: " I will admit that my knowledge of Superheroes and Comic Heroes is both limited and relatively new..."

You will read what you sow.

2010-11-05T21:04:00.000-04:00

I will admit that my knowledge of Superheroes and Comic Heroes is both limited and relatively new. Growing up, comic books were forbidden reading materials in our home except those Illustrated Classics Comics with titles like Arabian Nights, Prince Valiant, Hiawatha and Heidi, titles I am sure I would have rejected in any other format. After all they were “ featuring stories by the world’s greatest authors.”

I remember knowing a little bit about Superman and Spiderman and reading a stray one or other at somebody else’s house. The irony is, had my mother known the ethnic roots of the comic book genre, she might have been welcoming of its inclusion in the myth-making of our childhood; she who was so approving of all that arrived stamped with “Jews were here.”

The Madness of Gaines

At some point, I was able to sneak Mad Magazines (also begun by a Jewish guy) in past this ever-watchful Gate Keeper and was enthralled by Spy vs. Spy and that awkwardly illustrated tri-fold back cover with the words that reconfigured to make some vaguely political statement that I mostly understood. To my young mind these magazines were the ultimate expression of subversive thinking. Who didn’t love the clever cartoon parodies of popular movies and television shows? What about the mini-cartoons that were done outside the lines! Weren’t these all just building the foundations of what would become the contemporary graphic novel, a genre with no limitations that continually astounds and astonishes when well done?

I cannot resist a nod to WATCHMEN, a graphic novel that my 15 year old has read at least four times and his father and I have also read twice. He even bought a copy for his 90 year old grandfather to read. If you haven’t read it, you should. It is remarkable.

Who says books have to be a certain thing? Clearly with all of the hubbub going on in publishing, with the advent of Ebooks and the very real possibility of books containing Advertisements to both defray costs and well as build brand loyalty within genres as well as support writers, there is much to consider.

Just ponder the possibilities for a moment. Think about your favorite writers. Now pick a book. What product would the reader of this book be likely to purchase? For adult romance novels, what might be a better choice than a tip-in coupon for the Kleenex brand and perhaps a lovely sherry? For Science Fiction books, Science and Natural History Museums promotions and a discounted subscription to Discovery Magazine? For Cookbooks, imagine a mini William-Sonoma catalog or Food magazine subscription solicitation. In Westerns and International thrillers, we might find coupons for cigarettes and alcohol, even Dude Ranch vacations. In Historical Fiction, perhaps we would find Bombay Furniture brochures and local Antique Dealers Advertisements or packaged trips to visit locales mentioned in the book.

Books represent many things throughout our lives. And I remember in particular a pajama party at the home of my ninth grade English teacher, Mrs. Hirschhorn. She was a horsy-faced spinster, who invited a small group of girls to her home to welcome Evangeline, our Native American just-off-the-reservation exchange student, to the girls world of fuzzy slippers and baby doll pajamas toting hair dryers with inflatable bonnets in round pink suitcases. Mrs. Hirshhorn was sharp tongued and opinionated and in her class we endlessly conjugated sentences, memorized the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and how the boards did shrink, and listened to her chastise students who did not meet with her approval.

She rather less than generously included me in the festivities, not for my attentive scholarly behavior I was informed, but rather that I seemed so well liked by the others which she found curious. Damned with faint praise and just beginning to understand the cruelty of adults, I packed my sleepover goodies nonetheless and attended.

According to another attendee, a bit of a rabble-rouser like myself, Mrs. Hirshhorm prepared chicken with a corn flake crust for dinner. I don’t remember that but I do remember wandering around the house after dinner with this same person and finding a copy of Jaqueline Susanne’s Valley of the Dolls, eagerly looking for the dirty parts and getting caught by Ms. Hirshhorn. My mother certainly would not have approved of this, even written by the Jewess Jacqueline.

This brings me to the subject of public schools and their current state of affairs. Those who know me understand that I spend lots of hours in them and it’s really a conundrum to be an educator, parent of a public school student and a taxpayer. The solutions to the problems are not easy and are not just about money. But I think public schools are really missing the boat of the funding gravy train that so many others have figured out.

My simple answer to the financial shortcomings is corporate sponsorship. Nike might underwrite Football and Basketball. Nascar would sponsor the Driver Ed program. Apple would support Graphic Design courses. Microsoft could support the Engineering programs. Goodyear would sponsor the school buses along with Geico Insurance or Progressive, thereby actually living up to their name. The pharmaceutical companies would support the biology and chemistry classes. It just seems limitless to me. Each Corporaton would decide what courses or programs they wanted to sponsor, draw up a budget and the funds would be distributed nationally based on the class subscription at the same rate per student. Local taxes could come down, the corporate images would be enhanced and teachers might finally be paid a decent wage and be rewarded for their performance -- when merited. Tenure can disappear because of competitive wages and rewards.

In the meantime, educational administrators could attend to the work of providing their beleaguered staff with more training for differentiation in the classroom and get the breathing room to restructure the system to fit the needs of our next century, which must include getting rid of the dinosaurs.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow.

2010-10-28T17:49:00.001-04:00

I have recently spent too much time thinking about Hair, not the musical, but both those on my head and those found on other parts of my self. My head hair needs a cutting and as much as I love the magic fingers of Anne Marie at Bangz, she’s recently raised her prices to $80 plus a tip and I’m feeling not so flush these days. I will probably succumb anyway because she’s really great at her job and I could use some extra help.

It is at these hair raised times, about once every eight to ten weeks, that I confront my mortality in the form of the stray grays that keep emerging. I have been blessed with the late gray gene from my mother and even at the age of 57 have predominantly dark brown in the mix. Some days I feel that my grays are earned, slim badges of a life lived fully. Other days, particularly after a sleepless night, I just see a reflection of an older much more tired me framed by those very same grays. To color or not to color, that is the question.

Not a good look for anyone.

I’ve experimented from time to time with a variety of hair transformation products. A few years ago I added gold highlights. In retrospect, a decision made in a moment of weakness at a new salon, leaving me feeling and looking like Mrs. Roper…i.e. not a good choice. I’ve used henna rinses in bold cranberry – a slick 70’s disco inspired look – as well as black – an 80’s ethnic inspired look – but never felt comfortable or ultimately more attractive either way.

Occasionally I’ll ask my husband if he thinks I should cover the gray but he’s grown too clever to fall into that trap, even when I say “ But you have to look at me, I don’t.” He has learned that the only safe answer is “Whatever makes you happy, honey.”

For men, the hairstory is much more traumatic. They may morph form Justin Bieber to Uncle Fester by the time they hit 30. These poor men never get to have their Silver Fox moment. They are faced with the dismay found in the drain, that tangled unseemly mess left behind after morning rituals and a great hot shower. Men’s hair may also transmigrate to other body parts choosing to relocate to more exotic locales like ear lobes and shoulder haunches.

Even we women may on occasion find a stray hair or two or three, as in the hair on your chinny chin chin. There are also those charming moments when your innocent toddler may remark on these, including the adorable, “ Mommy, you have a spider coming out of your nose!” Thankfully said in private, now shared shamelessly with my readers.

But women are expected to do something about this irregularity using waxes and potions, painful and stinky to remind us of our own mortality as if the stray intruders weren’t reminders enough.

I googled Silver Fox

When I was younger and more unitoned, I had what I’ll call my hair-related trauma. Being single through the Eighties had it’s advantages ---unencumbered by a partner’s needs or career fluctuations, baby’s poo or extended family dramas ( although my nuclear group had more than it’s fair share…) -- gave me a certain freedom and nonchalance. I met lots of potential partners, enjoyed their company for a time and then moved on for reasons both real and imagined.

One such coupling included a successful young man with a great apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and an insouciance brought on by the sale of his business to a Fortune 500 company for over $10 million dollars by the time he was 30. He was quite a dashing character, tall dark and handsome and well groomed and mannered. We had several enjoyable dinners together at wonderful restaurants and one night returned to his apartment to express our mutual admiration. Sharing a chilled split of champagne on his terrace as the sun set behind the amazing Manhattan skyline, we snuggled and kissed in brisk Autumn air. As our affections became more fully realized, we moved into his living room for both comfort and privacy’s sake. At this point, disheveled, he excused himself to use the bathroom. When he returned, he was missing something. Yes, his hair was gone. He had transformed from Alan Alda to Yul Brenner without so much as a by your leave.

Now I am not typically left speechless or at a loss for words, as this blog frequently demonstrates, but I was Flabbergasted! Dumbstruck! I think first because I had no idea that the hair was not his to begin with and second, my next thought was – what else is removable? I readjusted my habiliments, stammered out an excuse about an early morning meeting I had forgotten about and hightailed it out of there.

Not because he was bald, in fact I find bald men attractive – always have – but what kind of person would just spring this on someone else? Where did he keep it in the bathroom? Did he have more than one? How did he wash it? My mind was aflutter with possibilities.

So on this Halloween Weekend, when little goblins and monsters are ringing for tricks and treats, consider the hair raising adventures of this Pop Culture Diva living the single life in the Eighties in the city where everything is possible.

Ms. Drew, the Sleuth of my youth

2010-10-22T21:05:00.001-04:00

A friend and fellow book amasser recently asked me for a recommendation for her husband and wondered whether there were any books that I had read more than once. A good question, since both of our homes are filled with them. The book I have read more frequently than any other and now given away 4 copies of, is Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg. It was published in 1992, translated from the original Danish, to great fanfare. I began to reflect on that choice later that evening and realized that part of the reason I am so enamored of Smilla, is that she, the protagonist of this wonderful novel, is much like my childhood heroine: the resourceful, clever, and always attractive Nancy Drew.

With her friends chubby Bess and tomboy George and blond boyfriend Ned standing in the background, no mystery remained unsolved for Nancy. I spent many childhood nights under the covers with a flashlight, long after my sister in the next bed was fast asleep, reliving those adventures again and again. I never tired of those stories and I have never outgrown admiring the clever, fearless, limitless-possibilities heroine. So I dedicate this blog to her, Ms. Drew, who put into motion a life long devotion to searching for, finding, and following this wonderful literary creature.

After Nancy, I found Miss Marple from Agatha Christie but she didn’t capture my imagination. She was an old nosy busybody and I found the writing stilted. I yearned for role models I could relate to. It wasn’t until the early 1980’s that I discovered them.

It began with An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, a novel published in 1972 by the amazing P.D. James. I actually first saw the 1982 British Film. It recounts the story of young courageous Cordelia Gray, the surviving partner in a detective agency who gets her first case after her (male) partner’s suicide. Then came The Skull beneath the Skin, Cordelia's next adventure and a delightfully gruesome and compelling one. James then went on to write her most celebrated series of literate detective novels starring policeman and poet Adam Dalgliesh. I’ve read them all but really loved Cordelia.

One of over 200

I had also learned in the intervening years that Carolyn Keene, author of the Nancy Drew series, was in fact one Edward Stratemeyer, founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate book packaging* firm. Stratemeyer was the first book packager to create books for the children’s market and his work included The Hardy Boys and The Bobbsey Twins books – Nan, Bert, Flossie and Freddie! These books were a huge financial success. I felt rather betrayed by this since I had imagined and dreamt of Carolyn as sweet old clever witty doyen. I began to look more carefully for real women mystery writers.

* These are different from book publishers. Book-packaging companies act as a liaison between a publishing company and the writers, researchers, editors, and printers that design and produce the book, combining the roles of agent, editor, and publisher. Book-packaging is common today in books aimed at pre-teens and teenagers. The Goosebumps series is a great example.

After P.D. James, came Ruth Rendell and Ngaio Marsh. Ngaio’s detective, Roderick Alleyn appears in all 34 of her books but it wasn’t until he marries the painter Agatha Troy that I got hooked. She helps Roderick solve crimes and many stories revolve around the theatre. Ruth Rendell’s stories often revolve around women’s issues and how women’s roles have changed in society.

Magnificent Mirren

On television I soaked up Honey West and her beauty mark, Cagney and Lacey, the great lioness Jane Tennison on The Prime Suspect Series, and skeptical Dana Scully on the X Files-- all modern versions of Nancy and friends.

Today we have female detectives and mystery writers everywhere from all walks of life. There’s Sara Paretsky’s Chicago-based V.I. Warshawski who jogs, has a dog, revels in her Polish working-class roots and succeeds in unearthing corporate corruption usually at some physical peril. These are well written tales as are Batya Gur’s Israeli based stores. Her tales are full of Jews but unlike Faye Kellerman’s Murder in the Mikvah series – as I call them, her detective studied history and literature at Cambridge and his unfinished doctoral dissertation on Medieval guilds remains on his introspective and cerebral mind. Faye’s work is fluff, Batya’s is meaningful literature, but there clearly is room for both.

Is there a 4th one?

Nick, Nora & Asta

There’s Sue Grafton’s spunky Kinsey Milhone, memorialized in the ABC series beginning with A is for Alibi. (I made it to P and got bored.) Patricia Cornwell introduced me to Virginia’s Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta who manages to solve the unsolvable in her series. Steig Larson's gave us the painful and unforgettable Lisbeth Salander in a posthumous series that has captivated the world. I must include Precious Ramotse, a rather large, jovial lady who runs a private detective agency in the Botswanan town of Gaborone using her common sense and strong judge of character, in an absolutely charming series by Alexander McCall Smith. I would be remiss if I didn’t include Anne Perry who writes these wonderfully atmospheric Victorian era mystery novels with detective William Monk and his cynical companion Nurse Hester Latterly or the series with Policeman Thomas Pitt and his wealthy wife Charlotte, the Victorian equivalent of Nick and Nora Charles -- my absolute favorite duo of dissolute detectives.

Then there’s Laura Childs and her Chef -- and Sunny Frazier and her Astrologist and for pure cartoon heroism it’s Velma Dinky, the brains behind crew Scooby Doo.

And of course there is Smilla, my grown up, independent, uncompromising, brilliant and difficult Greenlander with whom I started this journey. While they all have their place in this pantheon of detection, none rises so high or reaches as deep as my darling Nancy. Ms. Drew was oh-so-resourceful, believed in herself and was my companion under the covers every night, at a time when my world needed to find a girl like me to love.