Dreamscapes

Ten Cheap Ideas for Family Summer Fun

2010-05-31T23:40:00.000-07:00

Ten Cheap Ideas for Family Summer Fun

By Celeste Leibowitz

The school bell has rung for the last time, and the kids have burst outside, waving their report cards and singing, “No more pencils, no more books!”

Now what? It may be time to roll out those “lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer,” but how can you keep the family occupied without spending a bundle? Here are some suggestions for families with at least one stay at home parent (SAHP).

1. Start a co-op day camp: If you’ve got a babysitting co-op going to save on child care costs, you may have the makings of a co-op day camp. To get this going, round up four other committed families. Commitment is important, because if one family drops out, the structure falls apart.

Each family is responsible for two days each week. One family takes the lead role each weekday, with the second family acting as backup. This gives each family three weekdays completely free to pursue errands, relaxation, or keep up with the demands of a home based business. If the families can afford to chip in a little money, and a couple of families have teenagers, hire them to assist with the day’s activities, and give every family four days off instead.

Plan ahead for activities, and play to each parent’s individual talents. Have you got a musician, an artist or artisan in your group? How about a green thumb, a bird watcher or photographer, a dancer, an athlete? Who’s got a swimming pool, or a big back yard with lots of play equipment?

Each day should be different. One day the kids can bake cookies, the next day learn square dancing. Remember to plan alternate activities for those boring rainy days! Ask older children to keep a record of the camp fun, with photos and scrapbooks. At the close of the season, throw a potluck party or barbecue, and have the kids put on a talent show to demonstrate what they have learned.

2. Free programs for kids: Keep up with free activities offered during the summer. In some towns, the public schools operate free day camps and offer free breakfast and lunch for school-age children during the summertime. Libraries run summer reading programs with a kickoff event and a closing party for children who read the required number of books. There may also be arts and crafts programs, movies and free music offered at the library, along with the free books and films you can check out to enjoy at home. Investigate the playgrounds and parks; there are often free programs such as nature walks, storytelling, and sports events for youngsters.

3. A day at the beach: If you are near the seashore or a major lake with a beachfront, you’ve got hours and hours of cheap entertainment at your disposal. Take the kids swimming (only if there is a lifeguard, please!), and let them play for hours in the sand. Hunt for seashells, driftwood and “beach glass” that has been worn down to rounded edges. Bring home your finds and create arts and crafts projects as souvenirs. Help the youngsters to build a magnificent sand castle or other sand sculptures. For instructions, take a look at websites such as http://www.missico.com/personal/kids/sand_sculpture.htm. You don’t need fancy, expensive tools or equipment to make a sandcastle; utensils from your kitchen or garden will work just fine.

What to bring to the beach:
 Sunscreen with a SPF of 45 or better for babies and children (adults, use it too!)
 A blanket and lightweight beach chairs
 Sunglasses for everyone, swimsuits and towels
 Caps
 Picnic lunch and water
 Flipflops or water shoes for walking on blazing hot sand
 Toys: pails, shovels, funnels, spoons and forks, an old sifter

4. Free outdoor concerts and performances: Summertime is the best time for free music. Check online and in local papers, and find out when outdoor concerts, dance performances and even free or inexpensive circuses are in town. Bring a blanket or folding chairs and your picnic dinner, and dance while the stars come out. Some concerts even feature a fireworks finale.

5. Go birding: Bring a pair of inexpensive binoculars and bird guide (Half.com has lots of them), and watch the birds. Some parks have bird-watching groups that assemble in the early mornings. Note migrations and keep track of the species you spot. If the birds are close enough, take photos.

Do you live in an area with lots of pigeons? If so, the kids can take part in a scientific study, Project Pigeon watch. For more information, go to http://www.birds.cornell.edu/pigeonwatch/GettingStarted/kit and download a free Pigeon Watch starter kit. It’s fun, it’s educational, and it costs you nothing.

6. Gone fishing: Have you got a fishing rod and tackle sitting around the house? Or maybe you fish on a regular basis. Bring the kids, but be sure to observe the local fishing laws and regulations. Look them up online before you go, or the fine may ruin your frugal fun!

7. Hikes and bike trails: If you live near a state or national park, hikes and nature walks are readily available. For safety, bikers should wear a properly fitting helmet. Bring enough food and water, and put together your own “trail mix” of nuts, dried fruits and chocolate bits (M & M’s work well). You can find bicycle lanes on many streets and in the parks. Have fun, get some exercise, and enjoy the greenery as you march or ride along.

8. Parades and street fairs: Summer is also time for parades and street festivals. Street festivals are great fun, with free music and entertainment. They’re also a good way to learn about services and organizations in your hometown, because many groups rent a table and distribute their literature along with free samples and goody bags. One thing to watch out for at street festivals is the tendency to spend too much money on flea market items or exotic foods (shish kebabs, mango roses, frothy fruit drinks). Pack a lunch and stick to one food or drink item you can’t get on an everyday basis.

Parades provide great summer entertainment. Arrive early to get the best view, and bring that camera. Many towns have an Independence Day parade, but there are also plenty of unusual themes in towns and cities across the nation. New York City has the Coney Island Mermaid Parade on the first Saturday of summer, and a number of communities hold Pet Parades with costumes and prizes for the best-dressed pets.

9. Art shows: If your town has an art society or a camera club, summer is the time for outdoor art shows. The artwork itself can be pricey, so treat it as a museum exhibit and just look. Have the kids bring sketchbooks, pencils or markers, and make their own renditions of their favorites. Maybe one year their own entries will be in the show.

10. Explore your town’s history. Who founded your town, and when? What sort of people settled there? What was everyday life like a century, two centuries, and three centuries ago? Are your streets named for famous people? Learn the town’s folklore and legends. Are there any special “holidays” your town commemorates that no one else knows about? Celebrate them!

These are just a few of the many ways to enjoy summertime, keep the kids occupied and happy, and keep your budget on track at the same time. Happy summer solstice, everyone!

New Year's Goals

2010-01-02T08:53:00.001-08:00

It looks like I haven't given up completely. It's 2010, finally, and I am hoping things will be looking up. 2009 was not kind to us. Bruce lost his job because his plant closed down. After over 30 years in the envelope industry he had to search for something new in a new industry.

He's finally found something. It's a big step back financially, and there are no benefits. But we're considering it an internship, and hoping that if he proves his worth by September, when our COBRA discount is about to run out, they might be willing to work something out so he can have decent benefits for the family and be able to continue on there.

So the first big goal for 2010 is to get back on our feet financially and at least get back to where we were before the plant closing and the layoff.

My personal goal is to find a full time job with benefits, or else to raise my consulting rates to the point where I can afford to pay for benefits for the family.

Another goal is to continue fighting for healthcare for all Americans. We need Medicare for everyone, and any spare time I have I'd like to devote to this cause.

Jason's goals for this year are a part time job, achieving his A.A. degree, and starting towards his B.A. in the fall.

We're ready to take on 2010, but I certainly hope it will be a kinder year for everyone. I'm sure glad to see the back of 2009.

Should Dreamscapes Retire?

2009-10-31T09:14:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking about hanging this blog up and going for one that's more targeted. While I won't erase it, it's got some great memories recorded, I may grab some old posts and move them into a new, improved blog.

It's time to come up with a new title, a real focus, and a way to get some attention through social networking. Posting every six weeks or thereabouts is not going to get this blog noticed.

Some of my areas of expertise and/or interest are:

Frugal living (isn't everyone these days?)
Changing careers & job hunting
Grant writing
Causes: LGBT rights, especially youth
Health Care reform
I'm interested also in books and read a great deal, also in animal protection, human rights and other topics. What to choose??
That's going to be my question to ponder for the time being.

How to Conduct An Interview

2009-09-19T18:45:00.000-07:00

Recruiters, take heed. There are millions of job seekers out there, and we’re comparing notes.

Sure, the economy is supposedly recovering, but meanwhile job losses continue and the official unemployment rate is climbing towards 10 percent. That means work for you is down too, and many recruiters have received pink slips. At one recruiting agency for nonprofit organizations, every time I call, I hear another staff person has left.

So for those of you who remain standing through all this chaos, it’s imperative that you do your job well. This includes treating potential recruits with respect.

We may be a dime a dozen, but we’ve got more than one avenue for job hunting. We’ve studied up on the job market and we know which fields are in demand. Some of us have taken courses on writing better resumes and cover letters. Because this is the worst period of unemployment and general economic shakiness since the Great Depression, we’ve prepared ourselves for the job market as never before.

So please, don’t give us unsolicited advice about fixing up our resumes. If we’re having trouble getting interviews, we’ll ask for help. Don’t take it on yourselves to reformat or rewrite our resumes. One recruiter insisted my resume had to fit onto one page, and left out important information about my most recent positions in order to make it fit. Others drop the font until you’d need a microscope to read it. It’s a resume, not a Procrustean bed, folks!

An interview should help the recruiter elicit a candidate’s experience and positive traits. Ask the right questions to get these answers. Nit-picking at the resume and asking why we left our last three positions may be relevant, but if you fail to balance these questions with questions such as, “Describe your greatest achievement,” “What do you like most about (occupation),” or “How would you deal with this situation…” you’re not letting us put our best feet forward. That’s a loss to you, and a loss to the organization on whose behalf you are interviewing candidates. By being too zealous about making the candidate justify her years as a stay-at-home Mom, or questioning every achievement as if you are conducting a cross-examination with a hostile witness, you’re letting the good ones slip away under your radar.

Please don’t tell an older candidate to drop his college graduation date off the resume. We’ve read the pros and cons, and the decision to leave it in and face possible ageism is not an oversight. You aren’t the expert on his job search: he is. His next prospective employer could interpret the lack of a graduation date as evasiveness about his age or even put his claim to a degree in doubt.

In short, the more respectful and friendly you are, the more you establish rapport with a candidate rather than creating a back-room interrogation atmosphere, the better you’ll be able to elicit the candidate’s best examples of her skills and experience. Try this approach and you’ll find more potential employees for your clients. The bottom line? That’s more money in your pocket.

And remember, what goes around comes around. Treat us with respect, and we’ll keep in touch. When that pink slip comes your way, one of your former recruits might just point you towards your next position.

A Song for Healthcare Reform

2009-08-30T13:27:00.000-07:00

This is roughly to the tune of Meat Loaf's "Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth." Unfortunately my singing voice frightens the horses. I'm hoping someone who can play an instrument and sing might adopt this and use it at rallies.

The doctor said you needed a new operation
Well the doctor said you needed a pill
The insurance man said, No, you can't have that
Stay healthy or just go to hell!

The doctor said, without this treatment you're dead
There was nothing else they could do
So we sold off our house and we sold off our stuff
Almost sold off our firstborn too
Then we lost our jobs, no more insurance
Everything we worked for was gone
The emergency doctor said, we'll take care of you
But you didn't get here fast enough
You died in the ER, you died in the ER,
The insurance man laughed and said, Tough!

We gotta break their power, we gotta take back our lives
We gotta make the US join the first world
We gotta have single payer
Before we're all dead
Pass the public plan today, single payer tomorrow
Fight on for the people, fight on for the people, win it, win it now for Ted!

I've posted this on Facebook and sent it to Moveon.org. I hope it will be useful, because protest songs can really get people going. That's my contribution to the movement!

Health Care Rally in Times Square

2009-08-29T21:53:00.000-07:00

Bruce and I attended the rally for Healthcare Reform in Times Square this afternoon. I think there were more than the 1,000 people the media is reporting, but anyhow, we were a lively and spirited crowd. Bruce and I were right near the barricades, so we held our signs up facing the passing cars. Taxi drivers were especially happy to see us and honked their horns, even jumping out of their cabs at the red lights to take some of our flyers. Most of the tourists on the double decker buses seemed to support us also.

I'm convinced that more people support the public option and even single payer health care than the media is reporting. It's just that we may not be as vocal as we need to be. It's hard to get people to turn out to demonstrations, especially on a day where it rained in the morning. But I wore my poncho and went, rain or shine.

There was lots of positive energy at this rally and I hope we can continue to build on this energy and create a groundswell.

"Be Careful With My Heart," POP Arts at Hetrick-Martin

2009-08-29T21:42:00.001-07:00

After our visit to the Zoo, we headed into Greenwich Village to see a POP Arts show at The Hetrick-Martin Institute. POP Arts stands for Peers Outreaching to Peers, and the program educates young people about safe sex, STI and HIV prevention, and facts about STI's and HIV/AIDS. They also learn acting techniques and scriptwriting, and together they write their own play to inform other youths about what they have learned.

This year's show was a stunner. Called, "Be Careful With My Heart," it portrayed just about every kind of relationship: straight, gay, lesbian, and bisexual. Kids of various orientations attended a party where couples went off to bedrooms together, and heavy consequences resulted. There were breakups, there was risky sex, heartbreak and betrayal. Yet there was also a lot of built-in comedy so that the show was anything but grim.

One young woman sang a beautiful song, and there was a hot and humorous dance number. This is a talented bunch of young people coming to terms with different sexuality and with the hormonal ups and downs of horny teenagers. After the show, the performers answered questions from the audience. Many people were so touched that happy tears were shed. It was truly a moving and educational performance.

I was particularly struck by the dilemma one young woman faces. She is Muslim, and their tolerance of gays and lesbians is slim to none. I had to admire her courage in coming to Hetrick-Martin and taking part in this show, and I hope it will not blow up in her face if her father ever finds out what the show was all about.

Hetrick-Martin accomplishes so much with kids who would otherwise fall by the wayside. I'm proud to be associated with this great organization.

Thursday at the Zoo

2009-08-29T21:31:00.000-07:00

We visited the Bronx Zoo to celebrate Jason's 20th birthday. Thanks to his summer job, he was able to get all of us in for free and get us a 30% discount on lunch as well.

The animals were great. I enjoyed seeing many baby animals: a little lemur named "Cupid" because he was born on Valentine's Day, a baby giraffe, and a baby flamingo. Peacocks roam the Zoo grounds at will, and we got up close and personal with a peahen and her adorable chick. It's always fun to visit the zoo and learn some new facts about the animals there.

Don't Believe the Scare Stories

2009-08-08T16:47:00.000-07:00

It amazes me that people are believing the Republicans and the big insurance companies who are bending over backwards to stop a public health care option. They're shaking in their shoes believing that the government is going to decide who lives and who dies.

Guess what, people, wake up! Right now that's exactly what the insurance companies are doing. Not to mention the people who don't have insurance coverage, either because they are out of work (realistically, close to 20% of us when you count the underemployed and those who have given up) or because their employers simply don't choose to provide it. They're skipping doctor visits and taking half doses of needed medication. And guess what else, our infant mortality rates are the highest and our life expectancy rates are the lowest, in the industrialized world.

Even if you have insurance coverage, a layoff will do away with it. And even if you have insurance coverage, your necessary treatment could well be denied, even though it could save your life. So who is deciding whether you live or die? Not your doctor, that's for sure.

Back in the sixties, a cousin of mine was having a terrible struggle to have a healthy child. She had one miscarriage after another. Nobody's fault, right?

Wrong. She and her husband moved to the Netherlands so he could take a job there and complete a Ph.D. The Netherlands happen to have -- gasp -- socialized medicine. My cousin was placed on complete hospital bedrest for months of her pregnancies, and gave birth to three healthy children who are now young adults. Not one of them would have been born in the US where months of hospitalization would have been prohibitively expensive. I don't even think anyone suggested it to her as an option, here in the good old USA, best damn country in the world...except when it comes to taking care of our people.

Sure, there will have to be cuts, so how about if we cut down on unnecessary tests and on unnecessary procedures? Why does the U.S. have a disproportionately high number of caesarian section births? How about cutting back on that and having more natural childbirths? We can certainly trim expenses without harming anybody.

It's time to stop listening to the lies of greedy people who would rather snap up your money and let you die in a ditch, than see you cared for at the government's expense. It's time to insist that we catch up to the civilized world and take care of all our people...rich, poor or middle class, from the cradle to the grave, no exceptions.

Leaving a Bad Situation

2009-08-01T05:14:00.000-07:00

Consulting has a glamorous ring to it, but there's a down side as well. It's not steady work, and you sometimes have to be very aggressive in collecting your fees. Then there are the situations that should never arise.

I made the mistake of accepting a consulting position with an organization that had very little money. I knew they had almost nothing in advance, because I looked up their 990. But they promised me 15 to 20 hours of work a week, and I gave them a discount because they are a small organization.

That won't happen again. From now on, I will insist on being paid what I am worth; otherwise they can take their business elsewhere.

I also agreed to give them 15 hours of pro bono time to "get acclimated." If I had known that they were not going to stick with their original agreement, this also would never have happened. I certainly will not ever do it again.

All along, I was having constant conflict with the Executive Director, Z. Every time I asked a question she would throw some papers at me and tell me I had all that I needed, she needed to get her work done and I had to be a "big girl" and become independent. This is not the way to get a new consultant off to a good start. She also wanted to throw a number of proposals out the door, on the advice of a consultant with many years of experience.

When I investigated the targeted foundations, I found that almost all of them were a waste of time (and money). Most did not actually give to their cause. Some did but gave only out of state. Others had suspended grants because they were suffering as a result of the economic downturn. In fact, only one or two were viable choices, out of twelve. However, I continued to receive pressure to "tweak" the template proposal, a general operating support proposal that was requesting a huge amount of money to completely staff this tiny little volunteer organization, and shove it out the door.

Knowing this would not bring them any money, I was reluctant to follow through. I also received continual comments on just about everything, even whether I walked fast enough for Z., who claimed she had become a "real New Yorker" because she zips down the street at top speed.

Finally, I saw that the first week I was "on the clock," I actually was given only 8 hours of work, and when I asked where my 15-20 hours were, Z. told me that she could not afford to pay me for more than 5 hours a week because they "have no money."

Didn't they know that when they hired me?

I told her she really can't afford me, and should hire a student intern to do the work. A student would not be able to do the same quality of work, but since the organization seemed focused on quantity rather than quality, that shouldn't matter. Z. countered by asking if I were willing to take a reduction in my hourly rate so that she could give me more hours.

Wrong!

On Thursday I gave her my invoice for the 8 hours of work and quit. We had some harsh words; she is volatile and makes personal attacks. However, when she calmed down I suggested that she close down the organization and turn it into a program within some other, better funded nonprofit.

In any case, next time, I will not accept an assignment from an organization that has a tiny budget, especially one that has been incorporated for 8 years and is still not solvent. I'll know, next time, that there's a reason they have not been successful, and that I'm not going to be the one to pull them out of the morass they have made for themselves.

Salute to Pregnancy

2009-07-20T20:47:00.000-07:00

The New York Metro published a photo of pregnant women walking the bases at Keyspan Park, home of the Brooklyn Cyclones. This was a "Salute to Pregnancy." Apparently any woman who names her baby "Brooklyn" or "Cy" will receive season tickets for free.

Gee, that seems like a wonderful reason to saddle a helpless baby with a name that will embarrass him for the rest of his life. Cy isn't too bad, but Brooklyn? I thought the 60's were over and we weren't giving our kids stupid names like "Moon Unit," "God," or "Freedom" anymore.

And maybe I'm being a curmudgeon, but why are we celebrating pregnancy at a time when money is so tight? Is this really a great time to be bringing more kids into the world, when families are already struggling to feed the mouths that are already here? I don't get it. Anyone who is pregnant right now got pregnant, at the earliest, last November when the economy was already tanking. It surely wouldn't have been my choice; I'd wait until there was a better economic picture. But, I guess I have always been too sensible.

Maybe it's just a function of more people being out of work and attending the "poor man's opera" because they are home all day anyhow. After all, 9 months after the Buffalo Blizzard of 1977, there was a bumper crop of babies and one hospital in Buffalo gave the newborns tiny tee shirts that said, "Blizzard Baby."

Or maybe I shouldn't be so critical. Maybe having a baby is a way of expressing hope, that the recession will pass and prosperity will return. I sure hope it does so all these babies (and I've seen more pregnant women this year than I have in a long time) will have the food, clothing and shelter they need to grow and thrive.

Big Bucks

2009-07-16T15:21:00.000-07:00

Today, AM NY reported that a man who bought a pack of cigarettes received a whomping $23.1 quadrillion charge on his credit card bill.

Sure, it's ridiculous, and he doesn't have to pay, along with the others who suffered a similar glitch. But maybe it was a sign to him, that smoking cigarettes is much, much more expensive than the price of the pack. It might well cost him something worth more than quadrillions of dollars: his life.

The Bay News had a charming photo of Duke, one of the Aquarium's sea lions, giving a "sea lion kiss" to a young lady. The caption read that sea lion kisses are being sold as fundraisers for the New York Aquarium, at $200 a pop. $200? Wait a second! I happen to know that the real cost is $20. What a big blooper for the Bay News, whose proofreaders didn't catch that extra zero.

Then again, if some rich folks decide to buy $200 kisses, maybe the Bay News has done the Aquarium a big favor. It happened to me in my early days as a fundraiser: I tacked on an extra zero to a renewal request of a man who'd sent an unsolicited gift of $100 the year before. My boss chewed me out and told me to be more attentive to details, but the letter asking him to renew his gift of "$1000" had already been mailed. He sent the $1,000, and the next year he sent $10,000. So, we can only hope that this typo will turn into a windfall for the Aquarium.

Duke should only know that his kisses are 24-carat.

David's Dad

2009-07-10T19:28:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday, the day Bruce was laid off after 23 years at National Envelope Corporation, we had a phone call we missed until early Friday morning. My childhood friend, David, called to say his father passed away.

Max was a quiet man. I remember him well but I never felt I knew him all that well. David's mother was the one involved with the children the most, so I remember her personality much more clearly.

What I do remember about Max is that he was a sheet metal worker who changed careers, becoming an elementary school teacher instead. At that time, the mid-sixties, this was just about unheard of. I knew people who had one job their whole working lives. Certainly, my Dad had the one job at Regal Emblem Company, polishing and electroplating costume jewelry and emblems. He was offered the chance to get a government job and turned it down, afraid of change.

But Max wasn't afraid. He had a dream and he followed his dream. Sometimes the kids gave him aggravation, but he must have been very happy that he made that change. In any case, his bold move stayed with me. When I changed careers, jumping out of legal publishing into fundraising, it was his example I followed. If he could do it at a time when it just wasn't done, how much easier would it be for me?

Max and Muriel raised three good human beings, and that's the highest achievement a parent can reach. So long, Max, I'll remember you.

Hot Dog!

2009-07-05T20:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Bruce and I went to Coney Island to check out the Nathan's Hot Dog eating contest. I never realized that this famous July 4th tradition originated in 1916, the year my mother was born. We could hardly see the stage, but we could watch the proceedings on the ESPN screen.

Unfortunately the contest was supposed to start at noon but did not begin until about 12:50 PM and we just had other things to do. So we left before the contest started and got home while it was in progress. I got a laugh out of some of the contest rules, especially the one that said a contestant would be disqualified for "Reversal of Fortune." The contestants were called "Gurgitators," another one of those nonexistent words, sort of like "sheveled." Chucking up recycled hot dogs is a no no! One of the ESPN newscasters put hot dogs, mustard and ketchup into a blender and then took a swig of liquified frankfurter! Hilarious and yucky.

The crowd was taking sides; some rooting for Chestnut (who became a 3 time champ by scarfing down 68 hot dogs this year) while others rooted for Kobiyashi and held up signs saying "Kobiyashi eats chestnuts for breakfast!"

Directly in front of us, a group of young people were wearing bright yellow tee shirts advertising "Thatsnotcool.com," a website educating kids about the dangers of cyberbullying and how to fight back against online harassment, stalking, etc. I enjoyed speaking with them.

While I was annoyed that we didn't get to see the actual contest, at least we did get to see the build up to it. There was quite a crowd and some of them probably had been there for hours. It was amusing and finally I can say we attended a world class sports event!

Mermaid Parade, 2009

2009-06-27T12:51:00.000-07:00

Coney Island's "denizens of the deep" came out to play again this year at the start of summer. This year's Mermaid Parade began in the rain, but that didn't matter: mermaids don't melt!

They did, however, carry umbrellas and walk a lot faster than in previous years.

Before the parade began, I headed into a bar to use the facilities. There was a long line and I got talking with a gentleman wearing his hair in two pigtails, complete with teal streaks. He also wore a skirt fashioned from a transparent plastic tablecloth adorned with flowers. This was a clever way of keeping his legs dry in the rain, which was coming down pretty hard at that time. In the bar, I spotted Jennifer Miller, the bearded woman who runs Circus Amok (another one of my favorite entertainments).

We met Ferdinand on the bus heading over to the parade, but he was so intent on finding a good spot to stand that he got too far ahead of us. So we didn't stand together this year. However we met him again at the end of the parade.

I recognized a lot of the same faces from last year's parade. We saw the Elvis impersonator, the Parrot Man, the painted ladies, and of course Marty Markowitz, the Borough President, telling us we are all "meshugah" (crazy) and that this was the most undressed parade in town. (I've seen a lot of seminudity at the Pride parades too, though). The Polar Bear Club was there, along with the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, the Brooklyn Bombshells, and so on. There was the usual contingent of pirates, men in kilts, and mermaids with seashell or sea star pasties on their breasts. The costumes were up to their usual standard of wild, wacky, imaginative and sexy.

This year, Barnum and Bailey was there, but I wasn't so thrilled about that. The ASPCA has a lawsuit against them for violating the Endangered Species Act, and the circus's job application asked whether the applicant "is or has ever been" a member of PETA, The Humane Society, the ASPCA and other animal protection organizations. It smacked of the McCarthy Era and when I brought Jason's attention to it, he decided not to apply. Therefore I wasn't so happy to see the circus in the parade, even though the clown noses so many people wore were pretty cute. (Clown mermaids?)

The rain stopped after a while so that made it easier to take photos, but we had competition from the photographers who seemed to stop right in front of me every time a parader stopped and posed. There were so many photos I could have taken if they hadn't blocked my view. Still, I managed to take 930 photos and ruthlessly (!) chopped them down to a mere 291. Onward to the parade in 2010!

Star Trek: The New Movie

2009-05-29T09:49:00.000-07:00

This time, it really is the next generation. All of the old actors from the original show have been phased out, except that Leonard Nimoy as the elderly Spock still had a part.

I thoroughly enjoyed this romp through space and time. It was pretty easy to tell who the bad guys were: they had pointy ears, deathly pale faces, and wore ugly, sharp-edged facial tattoos. Clear signs of villainy.

It was amazing witnessing the "birth" of James T. Kirk and then seeing him briefly as an adventurous and rowdy twelve year old rocketing around in an antique car (retooled from the 20th century!). I don't know cars so I would not attempt to describe the model but it clearly dated back to the early 1960's or even before. Most of the new actors fit perfectly into their roles as "baby" Kirk, Spock, Bones, etc. Uhura seemed a little older than the rest whereas on the original show she was either the same age as the captain or younger. Chekhov bore no resemblance to the original actor, but that didn't particularly bother me.

It was a fun movie, despite the destruction of Vulcan and the loss of Amanda, Spock's mother. I wonder if they will be able to go back in time and prevent these tragedies in a future episode. If so, or whatever they decide to do next, I'm up for it.

The last moments of the movie, light playing over the "brand new" original Enterprise, with the words, "Space...the final frontier..." as a voiceover, put a chill right down my baby boomer spine. And Generation Y'er Jason loved it as well. So did Bruce. All three of us recommend it highly.

Crisis: Danger and Opportunity

2009-05-29T09:35:00.000-07:00

I've always heard that the Chinese character for "crisis" contains the characters for "danger" and "opportunity." Well, our family is in a crisis. On the Monday before Memorial Day, Bruce arrived at work to learn that the division he has worked at for 23 years is shutting down operations, and almost everyone except for a few family members and high ranking managers is being laid off.

So, we are all looking for work. I am hoping to become more visible as a freelance writer, even as I am seeking part time and full time employment. Bruce is looking for work in inventory control and purchasing, and Jason has many options either in animal care, clerical, or bookkeeping work.

Still, it's a scary proposition because so many well-qualified people have already lost their jobs. I hear unemployment has been extended out to 72 weeks now, but unemployment would not pay all our bills. So, we'd have to deplete savings until someone is back at work and able to support the family.

There's been a psychological toll, of course. We've all had interrupted sleep, and I managed to come down with some sort of bad cold or garden variety flu (not swine, thank goodness). The only up side to this is that I have not left my house since Monday, and therefore haven't spent any money.

This is going to be the real test of whether we can be frugal enough to get through a period of unemployment without sacrificing some fun and games.

What a week!

2009-05-15T04:47:00.000-07:00

This has been an exciting week for me. The grant proposal I was writing for The Hetrick-Martin Institute has finally gone out and the initial feedback is good.

I've finally overcome a mild case of writer 's block, and wrote a piece yesterday on the Buffalo Blizzard of 1977, which I experienced as a 22 year-old law student. Do the math, and I've just given away my age! I'm saving that for December as a friend in Franklinville assures me that the Blizzard of '77 is still memorialized each January in the Buffalo newspapers. Maybe they'll be interested in my personal experiences as an out-of-towner who had never experienced anything quite so devastating as a blizzard that shut down a city for two weeks.

Yesterday I submitted two stories to various magazines, and I submitted a third on Monday.

Also yesterday, while I indulged in lunch at Burger King, I received a call from Youth at Risk, inviting me to work for them on a short term prospect research project next week. This is not the first time I've been offered contract work as a result of sending out a resume for a part time job, and it proves that organizations do in fact keep promising resumes on file.

So I am revved and optimistic about what's to come. The weekend should be fun; we are planning to visit the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition's "Color of Hope" art show in Red Hook on Saturday afternoon, and I have the Brooklyn Humanist Community Book Club on Sunday. I wish all my readers a wonderful weekend and week to come.

"The Mermaid Chair"

2009-05-09T10:57:00.000-07:00

After reading The Secret Life of Bees I got Sue Monk Kidd's The Mermaid Chair and read that also. I enjoyed this book just as much.

It had elements of The Bridges of Madison County. Jessie's been married for twenty years and has a grown daughter in college. She's facing a mid-life crisis with her marriage gone stale, and is seeking something she's not sure of. At the same time, her mother, who has been steeped in excessive religiosity since Jessie's father died, has erupted into madness, cutting off her own finger.

Jessie goes to her mother without her husband Hugh, a psychiatrist and a bit of a know it all. The island she grew up on, Egret Island off the coast of South Carolina, has a peculiar custom. There's a monastery there to a St. Senara. Legend has it that this saint was a mermaid who converted to Catholicism, and became a saint. There's a carved "mermaid chair" kept at the church that is carried to the docks and used to bless the fleet on St. Senara's Day.

While she's trying to help her mother and to unravel the puzzle of her mother's self-destructive act, Jessie falls in love with one of the Benedictine monks, Brother Thomas, who has not yet taken his final vows. Jessie and Brother Thomas (Whit) find they have tragedy in common. Jessie's father died at sea when she was nine years old, supposedly blown to bits by a spark from the pipe she gave him. Jessie has lived with a terrible sense of guilt for all these years. Brother Thomas, a former attorney, has joined the monastery to escape from the pain of losing his wife and unborn daughter in a car crash.

The story is permeated by mermaid and siren symbolism and imagery, just as bees permeate the story of The Secret Life of Bees. Jessie, away from her husband and having instigated a separation, begins to find herself, to expand and be the artist she has always longed to be. She realizes that she has pushed herself into too small a space, always putting Hugh and their daughter first and her own amibitions and desires second. She's very similar to Francesca in Bridges in this respect.

The lovers are both "saved and damned" by their connection. Their brief affair forces them both to look at what they really want in life and what they have been hiding from. The mystery of Jessie's father's death is revealed, too, and brings a healing both to her and her mother.

I'm quickly becoming an avid Sue Monk Kidd fan, and I look forward to her future novels.

Bronx Zoo Photos

2009-05-09T10:50:00.000-07:00

On April 26th we braved the 92 degree record-breaking temperature and visited the Bronx Zoo. While it was "too darn hot" to see all the attractions, we did manage to see a number of fascinating animals. Here are a few of them.

The Secret Life of Bees

2009-04-26T15:27:00.000-07:00

In May our Book Club will discuss Sue Monk Kidd's "The Secret Life of Bees." This was a book that surprised me. Some of the works we have read have been way too depressing. This book is a book of hope.

It begins in the summer of 1964, at a critical juncture in the Civil Rights movement. Lily, fourteen years old, has bees living in the walls of her room. Her father, T. Ray, is neglectful and contemptuous of her. Lily's mother is dead, and her death is a source of Lily's shame and guilt, because she remembers just enough to believe she is the one who accidentally shot her mother to death at the age of four.

Their maid, Rosaleen, decides she is going to go and register to vote. That's controversialin the south where they live, and Lily foresees danger. She accompanies Rosaleen and it goes badly. Rosaleen is accosted by three very bigoted men and she retaliates by pouring snuff juice on their shoes. For this insult both she and Lily are hauled off to jail, and T. Ray bails Lily out but punishes her by making her kneel on raw grits. He calls them the "white Marthas" and I don't know what the origin of that expression might be, unless it's a contrast with the black Mary we meet later on in the story.

Lily has two mementos of her mother, a photograph and a portrait of a black Madonna. On the back is written, "Tiburon, SC." Coincidentally (not), her mother's name was Deborah, which means "bee."

Lily helps Rosaleen escape from the hospital where she is recovering from a savage beating by the three men who accosted her. They head to Tiburon just because Lily believes her mother must have once been there. In a grocery store, Lily sees a jar of honey with the same black Madonna on the label, and realizes the connection. She's led by this synchronicity to the home of the Calendar sisters, May, June and August.

August is the beekeeper who manufactures the Black Madonna honey. When Lily and Rosaleen arrive August welcomes them and allows them to stay with the family. She teaches Lily how to help with harvesting the honey and making the beeswax candles August sells to retailers across the country.

June, however, is not so welcoming. Her attitude to Lily is harsh at first. She makes Lily feel like an outsider in a black home when Lily is the one white person. Later, though, her attitude softens.

May, on the other hand, is so sensitive as to be dysfunctional. Anything that upsets her starts her singing,"Oh, Susanna," and running out to her "wall," a homemade "Wailing Wall" where she writes her sorrows and prayers, and puts them between the stones she has piled up there. There was a twin to May, named April, but April could not stand the restrictions and humiliations of racism, and she committed suicide as a teenager.

In this home, Lily begins to flourish as a young woman should. She learns beekeeping and she takes part in religious ceremonies where the sisters and their friends worship the black Mary, a ship's masthead that has become their holy icon. It's a blend of Catholicism and their own, woman-identified worship, that gives them all a feeling of strength and solidarity. One or two men take part in these ceremonies as well.

Lily meets Zach, the student who has been helping August since he started high school, and a tenuous, forbidden love starts to grow between them. In that era, in the deep south, there is no "place or time" for a black boy and a white girl. Yet they do have a few stolen moments, apparently condoned by the other women. Zach is determined to become a lawyer and fight for civil rights, a determination that is only strengthened when he is jailed unfairly for supposedly throwing a bottle or rock at the police.

The bees, their honey, and their secret lives, as they work for and tend the queen,become a metaphor for the family that Lily has discovered. She has found her hive, with the sweetness of love. The black Mary has become her loving mother, the one she has yearned for, the one whose love she has missed out on all her life.

The symbolism of honey, bees, and the black Mary permeate the book. Synchronicities abound, and Lily discovers that her mother did indeed stay at the sisters' home when she ran away from T. Ray. Even Lily's name has a symbolic meaning.

T. Ray tracks her down and tries to force her to come back to the peach farm with him. Legally he has that right, but it turns out that August and the other women are able to convince him to let Lily stay. She's lived through May's suicide, June's marriage, and she's learned the full story about her mother. She's found her hive and her queen bee, and she's ready to become a woman.

I enjoyed this book immensely with its spiritual overtones, with the majesty of the downtrodden, "like royalty among us," as Lily says. Even with Zach, there is a bit of hope because they walk together in the halls of the white high school where he has boldly enrolled, and ignore the taunts and crumpled paper students throw at them.

Honey is a healing agent: that's recently been "discovered" though people closer to the earth have probably known it for centuries. Synchronicity and following her heart leads Lily to Tiburon where she finds her heart's desire.

Read this book!It's not brand new, and I missed it when it was, but if you missed it the first time around now is the time to read and savor it. This seems to be a book designed to be read during the summer heat, set as it is in the sweltering Carolina summertime.

Yopp!

2009-04-26T15:23:00.000-07:00

In Dr. Seuss's classic, "Horton Hears a Who," every one of the tiny people on a speck of dust had to shout as loudly as they could in order to be heard by the other animals, who were intent on boiling the flower and locking Horton away in a cage. The infinitesimal Mayor of Whoville raced through the town to make sure everyone was doing his or her part.

It seems that way at first. People are shouting and singing, brass bands playing, drums thumping. But it's not enough. Finally in the very last building the Mayor discovers the smallest of all the Who's, a little child standing alone, doing nothing but playing with a yo-yo.

The Mayor grabs him and delivers a passionate speech. "This is your town's darkest hour!" he tells the little one. Convinced that destruction is near, the child at last opens his mouth and shouts out an amazingly loud, "YOPP!"

That one "yopp" puts it over and the other animals are able to hear that there are in fact sentient beings down there on that tiny dust speck. They are saved and Horton is a hero, instead of being caged as a lunatic.

That was one of my favorite stories as a little girl. Maybe that's why I keep answering the petitions that come to me in emails, why I keep sending my tiny donations and speaking out when I sense injustice.

I'm only one person shouting "Yopp!" but a whole lot of us little Who's got our voices heard last November, and now we at least have an administration that has its ear to the ground, listening for our "Yopps!"

And so I will continue to shout.

Dreams From My Father

2009-04-08T22:33:00.000-07:00

I've just finished Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father, a memoir of his childhood, youth and young adulthood. His struggles to come to terms with an absent father, his interracial and international background, and his entry into community organizing, are all here. Obama is an eloquent writer and it's a pleasure to read his descriptions of people, landscapes, and inner thoughts.

What this brings across to me is that President Obama has a handle on life in other nations and other cultures, that most Americans simply can't imagine. He's lived abroad and visited the country of his roots. How many of us have done that? I know when I toured other countries I felt removed from the people there, on the outside looking in at their daily lives. Tourists see museums and national monuments, not the living rooms of the inhabitants. Obama's experiences go so much deeper than that.

He has thought long and hard about his background and his image of his father, mostly compiled of stories told by his other relatives. He's thought long and hard about his racial status and about how to elevate the African American's status in our society.

It's refreshing and encouraging to have a President who can think, examine his own emotions, and write. I'd certainly recommend Dreams From My Father to anyone who would like a greater understanding of our new President.

Rat in a handbag

2009-03-31T17:12:00.000-07:00

That sounds scary, but it isn't. I took a walk on Avenue U today, doing various errands. At about East 22nd Street I spotted a woman who looked awfully familiar. I wasn't quite sure though, because she was wearing sunglasses and her hair was shorter than I remembered. She was looking at me also.

She took off her glasses and sure enough, we recognized each other. The woman was Rosemarie, the person in charge of the Animal Laboratory at Lincoln HS. We stood and talked for a number of minutes, catching up on our families and other news. Rosemarie said she was just coming from the veterinarian, that she'd had to take one of the animals from the lab to the doctor.

She pointed to her handbag and said the rat was inside. I asked to see, and she lifted out little Snoopy, an adorable black and white female rat. It seems Snoopy had mites, and had to see the vet. Rosemarie was on her way back to Lincoln where she was going to scrub out Snoopy's cage and herself too, to make sure there were no more mites.

She's so comfortable and loving with those animals. I loved the way she had Snoopy walking up her arm as we were talking. What a surprise and what a treat! I hope we'll get together soon (maybe with Snoopy, too).

"Waiting"

2009-03-27T20:30:00.000-07:00

Last night Bruce, Jason and I attended a fundraiser for The Hetrick-Martin Institute, at the Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village. The young people in their after-school POP Arts program put on a musical play called "Waiting," and used it as a fundraiser. They got an excellent turnout and brought in about $2,000 for the agency.

The play was about waiting for HIV results, waiting for pregnancy results, for love, etc. The kids wrote the scenes and the music. We were sitting a little too far back so some of the lines got by me, and I couldn't always see. But it is clear this is a talented group of kids!

It was great to see the staff and exchange greetings. A few people came over and I introduced Bruce and Jason to them. After spending the day helping with grants there, it's great to see the kids who benefit from the work!

Another "Dollar Stretcher" Publication

2009-03-22T14:49:00.000-07:00

My latest publication in the online and print magazine, "The Dollar Stretcher," has appeared online. Here's a link to the article, "Out of Work? Volunteer!" The article describes the benefits of volunteering while unemployed, and gives suggestions for people looking for a simpatico organization to volunteer for.

Take the Money Back!

2009-03-17T14:16:00.000-07:00

We have money invested with AIG and if they go under, we'll lose it. But I'm willing to lose that money in order to rescue taxpayer money from these greedy pigs.

They create a financial mess and the company is in danger of going under. Instead of getting canned and standing on the unemployment lines with all the innocent people their greed and incompetence put out of work, they're getting bonuses. No, better yet, we're paying for these bonuses. And they're saying they can't break these contracts or AIG will get sued.

Well, hey, so let them get sued! The government needs to scoop back the money that was given to them as a bailout, in an attempt to stop the economy from going under. Instead they used it to line their own pockets. Let's take back the money. AIG will be judgment proof, so who cares if some disgruntled executives...some of whom were responsible for this mess in the first place...get ticked off and sue?

You can't get blood from a stone.

These despicable characters should lose their jobs and they should be held accountable. Maybe we should bring back tarring and feathering, and ride them out of the country on a rail.

Getting those bonuses is the last thing that should happen, whatever it takes to force them to give back the money.

Nothing to be Frightened Of

2009-03-04T16:49:00.000-08:00

Nothing to be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes is a major departure from most of the memoirs I have read recently. It's got to do with his own family life but not in the usual way. He speaks of his parents' personalities and their attitudes towards death, as part of his own musings on the fear of death, and the influence of his own atheism (and more recently in his life, agnosticism) on his fear or lack thereof.

He brings in the stories and thoughts of many other famous writers: Flaubert, Renard, etc. What distinguishes this memoir is that it is not the usual litany of sorrows, the typical dysfunctional family or terrible disease that generally crops up in these books. It's about ideas first and the circumstances of his life second.

I've gotten so tired of the typical "my life was dreadful but I have triumphed" story line. That doesn't mean I am boycotting memoirs but I'd like to see more variety in them. Nothing to be Frightened Of isn't a light book, in fact it is so dense that I am reading it much more slowly than usual. Yet Barnes has a sense of humor about it all and manages to say something funny on almost every page. He's also talking about a subject that haunts us all but almost no one ever speaks about. I appreciate that.

Good News

2009-02-28T01:18:00.000-08:00

This past week, the New York Times carried two stories I was happy to read. In "Study Documents the Stress of Waiting for Biopsy Results," a Harvard study reported that women who had to wait more than five days for results of a breast biopsy had stress hormone levels in their blood just as high as if they'd been told they had cancer. Why is this good news? It's good news because, finally, someone is paying attention to the dangers of waiting ridiculously long periods for test results.

The high stress levels could actually impact on a woman's ability to fight off the disease. So being forced to wait is more than just mental torture, it's actually harmful and can affect the outcome. Maybe now that this study has been published, medical labs will be pressured to produce results considerably faster.

Each time I had another test, I had to wait, usually at least a week. Those weeks are spent in a hellish way station. Without the answer, it is impossible to visualize the future. Will life go on as before? Or will it be permanently, perhaps fatally altered? There are times when we can take our minds off the test, but it comes back, again and again. Then comes the moment of the fateful phone call, with the receiver slippery in the sweating palm.

Speeding up the process and getting an answer is much better than prolonged waiting. I hope that this study will provide the incentive that's needed to respect our psyches and our health by getting the results out quickly.

The other good news was in an article about schoolroom furniture. Schoolroom furniture? That's right. The story, "Students Stand When Called Upon, and When Not" describes an experiment in Minnesota classrooms. Children who are wiggly and find it difficult to sit still throughout the school day now have the option of standing up during class. Special desks and stools that adjust to allow for sitting or standing have been placed in classrooms. There are also footrests so the students can stand and swing their feet while they do their lessons.

If only this furniture had been developed 13 years earlier and implemented in New York City classrooms, Jason's first grade might have been a bit easier. His first grade teacher might as well have flown to class on a broomstick. Rumor had it that she'd taught in Catholic school and was used to imposing harsh discipline on little children. Once, a little girl came to school without her bottle of Elmer's glue, because her mother had forgotten to buy it. Jason's teacher made this child stand up for the entire day as punishment.

No one was allowed to sharpen a pencil in her class. So what did you do if it broke? One day another little girl was discovered with pencil shavings on the floor under her desk. Horrors! She was accused, and when she pleaded not guilty, the teacher branded her a liar in front of the class.

She tore up Jason's coloring because he colored outside the lines (and she knew he was receiving physical therapy). After that, Jason lost interest in any arts and crafts. Our friend Richard, on hearing this, said she ought to be horsewhipped. I would have watched that with pleasure.

One of her complaints about Jason, when we met with her for open school night, was that he stood up while working. Such a terrible sin had to be squelched. I can only imagine how she must have badgered him.

I should have gone to the principal but I was afraid if I did she would take it out on Jason. I suppose I should have waited until he was done with first grade and then complained. But I was afraid, also, that she might be assigned to teach a higher grade, and he could end up in her class again. So I never said anything, except directly to her.

Anyway, now, too late for Jason but not too late for the next generation, there's finally some recognition that kids don't have to be sitting down with their little hands neatly folded in order to learn. Some of them learn by moving. Jason wasn't even aware that he was getting out of his seat. Tomorrow's children can just adjust the desk, and sit or stand at their pleasure.

I bet they will learn just fine, and I bet they will be happier and more eager to go to school than the past generations of kids who were forced into a cookie cutter.

That's the good news that was fit to print.

A Demagogue's Task

2009-02-20T13:11:00.000-08:00

Today as I walked uptown to the Mid-Manhattan Library I passed the CUNY Graduate Center. A sign in the doorway read, in huge white-on-red lettering, "A demagogue's task is to become as stupid as her audience, so that they will believe they are as clever as she is."

I don't know the origin of this quote but it was reproduced in such size that it struck me as well worth repeating here.

Shame on the NY Post

2009-02-19T19:21:00.000-08:00

The New York Post has a long history of tasteless and offensive reporting. I remember the headline, "Headless Body Found in Topless Bar." Ugh! This time, though, they have gone over the line.

A few days ago, a chimpanzee that was kept as a house pet and "acted human" went berserk and mauled a woman who was a guest at the home. The chimp's owner tried to stop it by stabbing it but had to call in the police, and the animal was shot.

As an aside, I don't think it's morally right or smart to keep chimpanzees or other wild animals as pets. This one dressed and bathed himself, drank from a glass and watched TV, but no matter how much he appeared to be "tamed," wild animals are dangerous, and it's cruel to try to fit them into our lives and then have to destroy them when they act like the wild creatures they are.

In any case, the Post published a cartoon showing two policemen with guns drawn standing over a dead chimp, and they're saying, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill!"

Now although they tried to deny it, it is obvious that the dead chimp is supposed to be President Obama, who had just signed the stimulus bill. There's no excuse for something like this. It is racist, disgusting, and completely over the line.

I'm in favor of freedom of speech, but President Obama was elected by a popular majority and an electoral landslide, and he deserves some respect. Besides, this was practically an incitement to violence. Heads should roll over this. There was a protest at the Post headquarters today. I thought of going to it but didn't quite get myself moving fast enough, and at the time when I should have been getting on the subway I was still at the bank taking care of an errand.

I hope the Post receives millions of protest letters. What they did was an abomination.

Thoughts on "1984"

2009-02-12T13:22:00.000-08:00

Recently I rediscovered a longstanding fascination with Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, “1984.” I must have been fairly young when I first read it, maybe not more than ten or eleven years old. Some of it must have sailed straight over my head, just as the other adult novels I read at the time did. Still, I understood enough to compare certain aspects of Orwell’s nightmare vision with the world I saw around me.

At that time I was in junior high school. Although it was a public school and no physical punishment was allowed, our lives were closely regimented. The Assistant Principal, Miss Cahill, was a tyrant worthy of the Thought Police.

She was a blue-haired old lady, in the days when rinses intended to spruce up gray hair turned a woman’s tresses to an unmistakable and unpalatable shade of blue. Rumor had it that she ran her English class like a prison camp. Everyone in the class had to click his pen at exactly the same moment. I guess she’d never recovered from the gradual demise of the fountain pen. If a pen or pencil dared to roll off a desk during Miss Cahill’s lesson, the resulting sound as it clattered to the floor would earn its owner a trip to detention.

I had the good fortune never to end up in her classroom, but Miss Cahill presided over the cafeteria in the same arbitrary and capricious manner that befits all petty tyrants. When she wanted silence, she put two fingers in the air, and everyone else had to put their fingers in the air also. Had I been slightly older, I would have raised only one finger, the one most fraught with emotional significance. As it was, I frequently substituted the Nazi salute. No one ever noticed.

Miss Cahill punished students for their “attitudes,” driven by some inchoate gut feeling that they were not sufficiently submissive to her orders. Time and again I heard her assign students detention for having the wrong look on their faces or because she didn’t like their “attitude.” Orwell had a Newspeak word for this: Facecrime.

I wrote a revolutionary tract urging the students to rise up and fight back, to reclaim our rights to have our faces look any way we wanted, and to talk throughout the lunch period instead of a meager 15-20 minutes until we got the flying fickle finger salute of silence. But I never distributed it. Copying wasn’t so easy back then: you had to use a mimeograph machine or layers of carbon paper in your typewriter. It wasn’t worth it to me. However I rejoiced when once, Miss Cahill pushed us too far and the students fought back, shouting and jumping up on the tables in defiance. We were squelched, but like Winston Smith, I felt for a moment that perhaps the great rebellion was going to succeed. Miss Cahill did flee the cafeteria crying, her hair-trigger nerves shot by our loud defiance. But, as in “1984” our revolt failed.

In any case, I had to recognize that no matter how much Miss Cahill resembled an agent of the Thought Police, the stakes were not nearly as high.

For years, I misinterpreted the ending of the book, believing that Winston was shot to death right there in the Chestnut Tree Café. It took a long time to realize that although physical death was not far away now that he’d fully capitulated, the bullet spoken of was a metaphorical one. His soul and his capacity for independent thought had been blown out as surely as if by a bullet.

So why, then, is such a depressing novel so fascinating to me? I enjoy the beginning, Winston’s rebellion and his affair with Julia. Our modern world has turned out partially like “1984” with a large helping of “Brave New World” added to the mix.

Today, we can be observed through the Internet. There are cameras galore in public places, watching our every move. We’re given the impression that they are used to protect us from terrorism and criminality. To an extent I am sure that’s true but the potential for misuse is huge.

Cookies and spyware watch our activities online. The government in recent years has tapped phone lines with no warrants, and has demanded that bookstores reveal the buying habits of their patrons. A new technology observes you as you watch advertising and adjusts the ad to your gender and age. We’re told that the technology can’t yet recognize the individual watching but is that really true?

Winston would surely find a great deal of modern technology to be frighteningly familiar and even more advanced in some of its spying capabilities.

Falsification is of course possible as evidenced by the epidemic of identity theft. Could the government misuse our personal information? Sure it could.

Can we protect our privacy? At this point, probably not.

As for the affair between Winston and Julia, I don’t see evidence in our modern world that any governmental entity desires to break down the emotional ties and loyalties between friends and family. In the private sector, though, our family lives have often come into conflict with the demands of our jobs. Doesn’t it break down family ties when employees are expected to work overtime, travel anywhere and everywhere, and miss family events in order to give all of their energies to the company? They can’t arrest us or torture us, but they certainly can deprive us of a means to make living, and that’s a serious enough consequence, especially now.

In “1984” sexuality was to be denied and the ultimate goal was to destroy it, abolishing the orgasm and breaking the family unit up so that children would be artificially conceived and then raised by the State. The artificial production of children was achieved in Brave New World but instead of abolishing the sex urge the power elite chose to allow it but to trivialize it. Loyalty to any one person would be “bad for production” and so people were strongly encouraged to be promiscuous, having as many partners as possible and viewing them all as simply recreational companions to whom they owed no exceptional loyalty. In a sense our own society has taken that route, without it being necessarily planned as a way to keep workers “stable” and untroubled by any family stress.

However, romance, love and joyful sex certainly do exist in our world of 2009, and Winston and Julia would be delighted to learn that this is not a crime, at least not in America. There are other places where people are not free to choose their own partners, and where sexual love with a “wrong” partner can be punished by death, such as in the case of “honor killings” of women and girls who are even suspected of illicit or forbidden involvement with men.

So, they would have their work cut out for them, bringing the importance of individual freedom and self-determination to the front and center.

I may have seen the “1984” movie before but I barely remembered it, and it seems a false memory now because I seem to recall watching it in the apartment where I grew up. It isn’t possible that I saw the 1984 version there because we moved out in 1971. I may have seen the 1954 version with Peter Cushing. I watched that one on YouTube the other day and found it dreadful. It was dated and so old-fashioned. The lovers never removed an article of clothing (except for the checkered sash Julia wore- which was supposed to be red, according to the book). The acting was substandard and the whole thing had the feel of a primitive science fiction movie. In fact, that’s what it was.

By contrast, I loved the 1984 version with John Hurt and I have already watched it several times on YouTube. This one was filmed during the exact time period of the book’s setting, from April to June 1984. Clever indeed! Moreover it is extremely true to the book. Everything was dingy, gray and half broken down, just as Orwell described. Winston’s flat in “Victory Mansions” was one step above a slum. No one decorated their homes with anything the least bit personal, so their living quarters were completely soulless.

John Hurt did an excellent acting job. He was completely believable as Winston. His face had a sad and vulnerable look to it even when he was happy with Julia. While not handsome he had a peculiar brand of beauty (as Winston said of the immense prole woman hanging out her wash beneath the secret room, that was his style of beauty).

It’s a fascination I don’t fully understand but I have returned to it from time to time. Could anyone have stood up to the horrors of Room 101? And once the words were spoken, were they really so indelible? Could love be squashed so easily? It’s true that young people in cults have often been brainwashed to believe that their parents are evil, just trying to lure them away from some obscure “truth” with their protestations of love. So maybe it is possible. However, deprogramming suggests that the process is reversible. Could Winston and Julia have been deprogrammed to rediscover their love for each other? It’s possible, but in their world, no one had any interest in doing so.

Just as much as the day it was published, and maybe more so in our modern world where the internet sees all, “1984” stands as a warning and a call to resist the forces that would find it convenient and rewarding to crush the human spirit while making us believe we are living a “new, happy life.” May we always recognize encroachments on our freedom to love, freedom to think and feel, and freedom to remember the past as it was. May we always remember, that 2+2=4.

"I Screwed Up"

2009-02-04T09:24:00.000-08:00

That's what President Obama said, regarding his supporting Daschle's nomination. Well, maybe he did screw up, maybe Daschle and a couple of others weren't vetted as closely as they could have been.

But I'm proud of the President even if he did "screw up." That's because he's a big enough man and a strong enough man to admit he made a mistake. Oh, sure, President Bush admitted to a few mistaken decisions as he was leaving office. That doesn't exactly help all the people who were harmed by those wrong decisions during his eight years in the presidency.

In President Obama's case, this mistake happened only two weeks after he took office. So he's out there admitting he erred, saying baldly, "I screwed up," without dodging behind excuses. What a refreshing change from the past eight years! In fact, I don't think I've ever heard a POTUS say right out that he screwed up, right in the middle of the problem.

By trying to take accountability to a higher level, our new President puts himself in a more vulnerable position than any past president has ever taken. Will he screw up again in some other way? Probably he will. There's no real preparation for this position. It is unique in the world, and the on-the-job training is as rigorous as it gets. From day one, he's expected to hit the ground running, and never more than today with all the problems he's inherited.

A leader who can say, "I screwed up," deserves respect. We can only learn from our mistakes if we are willing to own up to them. Here's a leader who isn't pretending to be a demigod. He's showing character instead of bluster. Good for him!

Hire America

2009-02-01T07:39:00.000-08:00

I've just read that the banks receiving the biggest bailout money have been applying for the most visas to bring in foreign workers to their employ. This has been going on for at least six years and probably longer. The foreign workers are filling top spots and earning more than $90,000 a year on average. That's more than twice the earnings of an average American household. And those are the very people who got those outrageously large bonuses, that President Obama spoke out against.

This is just wrong in so many ways. At a time when so many Americans are out of work, why are we allowing this to go on? If outsourcing to other countries is something the President wants to see discouraged, then surely "insourcing" of foreigners into the country for the express purpose of snapping up American jobs should be firmly discouraged as well.

The ironic part of this is that the reason these foreigners are being hired is not that they are more competent than American workers, but that these companies find ways to pay them less than what they would have to pay their U.S. born and bred counterparts. Now, I personally can't find myself weeping for the unfairness of earning "only" $90K, but there it is: we're spending our taxpayer money bailing out these banks that have mishandled the trust we put in them, and they are returning the favor by putting Americans out of work, every which way they can.

I want to see a law, plain and simple. No more outsourcing. No more favoring foreign workers over Americans. If two people apply for a job and have equal qualifications, the American citizen gets the job. Period, end of story. Why should people who have worked here and paid taxes their whole lives be put out of work and maybe out on the street, so that companies can pay foreigners less?

Oh, and those equal qualifications must NOT have anything to do with bilingualism. That should no longer be permitted to be a job qualification. Yes, I'm in favor of our next generation, the little ones, learning a second language. But which language are they going to learn? Here where I live, you can't get a job unless you speak Russian, or Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese...maybe both), or Korean, or....you get the picture. And once they learn a second language thoroughly, meaning from pre-kindergarten onward, then it might be fair and equitable to allow bilingualism to be a job qualification.

But not now. No young adult of working age today who was born to English-speaking, American parents and educated in our public schools can possibly compete with a native born speaker or a child of native speakers. We have to level the playing field here, and the only way to do it is to abolish bilingualism for at least the next 18 years, and then institute foreign language as a subject taught from pre-kindergarten forward.

Otherwise, the foreigners will pour in, destroy our standard of living by accepting lower wages, and take away all our jobs because they are "bilingual" (some of them marginally able to speak English still get jobs requiring them to speak on the telephone) and we, victimized by our school systems, are not.

In England, workers are striking and demanding that jobs be given to native Englishmen and Englishwomen before foreigners. Good for them! We need a similar outcry here.

So here's my battle cry: buy American, as much as possible, hire Americans first, and take bilingualism out of the job descriptions!

Busy, Busy

2009-01-31T12:39:00.001-08:00

The last couple of weeks, and now the coming week, are going to be very busy ones for me. So much is happening that I'm having a hard time keeping it all straight and recording it all in my three planners: the calendar on the kitchen wall, the pink planner in my tote bag, and Outlook on the computer.

I've been asked to serve on a steering committee for The Hetrick-Martin Institute to plan activities for their 30th anniversary year. We had a choice of subcommittees and I chose the Archive subcommittee. The idea of going through old papers and memorabilia intrigues me, and I liked the idea of interviewing alumni, former board members, and former staff. We've got a Yahoo group started so the subcommittee can keep in touch with each other, and I've suggested we do some of the interviews through StoryCorps.

This week, I have a conference phone call at noon on Monday for the Brooklyn Humanist Community. We're getting started with the incorporation process and this is the first step. At one I'll have an interview for a long-term temporary position.

On Tuesday I'm volunteering at HMI and then there's the BHC Board meeting at night. Wednesday evening I'm meeting with someone I worked with in the past, and I'll possibly write a grant for her start up organization. On Thursday morning I've signed up for a workshop on planning special events, through the Foundation Center.

By Friday, if I am not too exhausted, I might go and help out with the physical archives. Somewhere in there I also have to get medical clearance to volunteer with veterans in hospice, work on another grant with the War Resisters League, and arrange lunch with a friend.

I'm sure glad we are basically goofing off today, until the party tonight. It's Bruce's birthday and was our friend Tony's birthday on Thursday. So we've got a January Babies party for tonight, complete with a grab bag so everyone gets a small gift. Tomorrow I'm getting my hair cut, as it is approaching Lady Godiva length, and then on Monday the whirlwind begins.

Thinking About the Afterlife

2009-01-23T20:39:00.000-08:00

Do I believe in an afterlife? Generally I answer yes. I've written an entire manuscript based on the idea that there is an afterlife and I have been in contact with the spirits of various loved ones who have died, or, as devotees of the afterworld prefer to say, have "crossed over." I had many experiences around ten years ago and for the next few years, that convinced me we do go on in some form or another.

I'm not sure exactly what to believe in terms of what that form may take. I have read quite a few books on the subject: Hello from Heaven, books by popular mediums such as James Van Pragh, Sylvia Browne, John Edwards, and Rosemary Altea. In fact I saw Rosemary Altea in person through a class given by the Learning Annex. I don't remember so much about the readings she gave but I do remember that at one point I turned my head to look at an empty pew behind me (the event took place in a large church), and saw what I can only describe as an ameboid blob of ectoplasm, undulating. When I glanced back a second time it was gone.

So I have to believe I have seen, felt, and heard the spirit world at various times,and yet now, all this seems so remote with the passage of years. At one point I was sure I would never be afraid of death again, but in fact that feeling has proven to be only temporary, and any alarming symptom still has the powerto send me into a panicked tailspin.

Still, some of the things that happened back then are extremely hard to explain. For instance, in 1999, everyone was worried about Y2K computer compatibility. There were dire warnings that our computer systems might all collapse bringing the end of the world as we know it, Bruce was using an old version of Quicken on our vintage Macintosh Performa, which has long since gone to computer heaven. The computer froze up on him and he rebooted, calling out to our deceased friend Richard to help him out.

When the computer booted up again and Bruce opened Quicken, it was suddenly Y2K compatible. I still cannot think of a sensible explanation for this. What could change the program in the blink of an eye? Bruce had installed no upgrades. Even stranger, Quicken remained Y2K compatible for several days and then reverted to its former self.

It was episodes like these that made Bruce into a believer. I had already been convinced by other events: dreams that came true, a New York Yankees hat sliding towards me at the North Sea in the Netherlands, bearing a strong resemblance to the hats Richard used to wear. So many things happened that convinced me Richard, my mother, and other friends who died in 2000 and beyond were watching over me and looking out for my welfare.

Yet now, it all seems rather remote. I still see some of the signs but have I grown cynical again? Perhaps I have. I do think of Richard when I see the numbers 7, 77, or any string of 7's. I know that in the numerology system, 7 is considered a perfect number, recognized by several world religions. I also know that in the Gematria, the number 26, which is my birthday and my brother's birthday, and which popped up so often in my mother's life that she became afraid of it and tried to avoid the number, has a special and very positive meaning. Twenty-six stands for the unpronounceable Hebrew name of God. When I see that number, I think of it as a sign from Mom and a special blessing.

And yet, in bed at night, sometimes when I can't get to sleep, I worry and fear death. I fear the dying process will hurt, at least in the beginning. I have seen that at the end the dying person sinks into a coma and there doesn't seem to be a struggle or pain at the moment of passing. But it is the ravages of loss of control, pain and debilitation that I fear most.

I also find the thought of the world"wagging on" without me disturbing. If I am conscious and watching from the other side, fine, but I resent the thought that the world will change, my son will live out his life, probably have children and grandchildren,and at some point I won't be there to see it any more. At least if I can watch and lend an occasional etheric hand, whisper some long-forgotten motherly advice in his ear..that might be satisfactory!

The thought that I could be all wrong and there might be nothing afterwards, just a blankness I can only imagine by trying to remember what the world was like before I was born, still haunts me even though I had so many experiences and so many contacts with the afterlife that I should be more secure in that knowledge by now. I don't know why. I had so many readings that rang true. A medium gave me accurate information about my paternal grandfather. She didn't even know my name, and he died before I was born so I knew very little about him. She could not have been drawing this information from my mind,because it was never in my mind to begin with. The only possible explanation is that she was truly in touch with his spirit.

So, why do I still have these doubts and fears?

"Milk"

2009-01-21T21:21:00.000-08:00

This afternoon I met Jason in Chelsea and we saw "Milk." The price was high: $25 for the two of us, no student discount and no matinees. I don't feel gypped at all, though my wallet is considerably lighter.

"Milk" was excellent. Sean Penn did a wonderful acting job and I hope he gets an Oscar for it. As the film progressed, I realized that even though I'd known of Harvey Milk and his assassination, I really never knew the details of his life and what he accomplished.

After the Stonewall Riots, there were certainly the stirrings of a gay rights movement afoot, but Harvey Milk seems to have put it on the map. He brought the gay population of San Francisco together to fight against the discrimination, harassment, violence and even murder that dogged them, just because they were gay. He lost his bid for City Supervisor three times but came back again until he won. Because of his leadership, gays gained a voice and gained many rights they never had before.

Though I don't remember his activities and speeches per se, I do remember his arch-opponent, Anita Bryant, and her revolting, bigoted efforts to relegate gays to second-class citizenship as people who were not acceptable to right-wing Christians and to God. I do remember seeing buttons lambasting her with the slogan, "A day without human rights is like a day without sunshine," a parody of her orange juice ads years earlier (a day without orange juice is a day without sunshine).

The film delved into Milk's private life. Yes, it's a cliche that when a person becomes deeply involved in a cause larger than himself, his intimates often suffer. So Milk's lover, Scott, picked up on impulse in a New York City subway station in 1970, left him because he could no longer stand to be part of the political campaigning that took up so much of Milk's time and energy. And Milk's next lover, the passionate but emotionally frail Jack, committed suicide because Milk came home late from the Supervisor job one time too many.

I'm not sure at what moment I realized who Milk's murderer was going to be, but towards the last quarter of the film it became clear that another Supervisor was going to kill him, and the Mayor as well. Milk is portrayed as sensing in advance that he was not going to live to see 50, and that his death would be violent. He'd received death threats and he knew his stance as an openly gay politician was extremely dangerous. So we see him, at intervals throughout the film, speaking his story into a tape recorder, to be aired only in the event of his assassination.

Sadly, his fears came true, and he was murdered along with the Mayor. The candlelight march through the streets of San Francisco in their memory was a very moving scene. Jason whispered to me that he had tears in his eyes. So did I, and that doesn't happen very often.

Thirty years ago, just a year after Harvey Milk's murder at age 48, a teenage boy was beaten and raped in a New York City homeless shelter, because he was gay. Instead of acting to protect him, the shelter authorities blamed the victim and threw him out. Two gay men, one a psychiatrist, were appalled at this story and started a voluntary program to help LGBT youth who were not adequately protected by the system. From their efforts grew the Hetrick-Martin Institute, the home of the Harvey Milk High School.

A particularly poignant scene, for me, was the one where a gay teenager calls Harvey Milk and begs him to help. He says his parents are going to send him away to be "treated" for his "sickness" of homosexuality. The boy says he is going to kill himself. Milk tells him to get on a bus and get out of there, just leave home and head to a big city where he can find understanding and others like himself. The camera pulls back and we see that the boy is in a wheelchair. His situation seems hopeless, and Milk is forced to hang up the phone because a riot is going on in the street.

Later in the film, we learn that the boy got a friend to put him on a bus to LA, and he calls Harvey Milk in the middle of a referendum on Proposition 6 (the notorious attempt to strip LGBT's of their rights to housing and jobs), to tell him that he is doing fine, and that Los Angeles has voted the proposition down.

It's kids like that boy who show up at the doors of The Hetrick-Martin Institute. Seeing "Milk" has made me doubly proud to volunteer there, and indirectly serve the students at a high school named for Harvey Milk. My highest recommendations for this movie!

Inauguration Day

2009-01-21T20:27:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a day that will be in the history books: January 20, 2009, and kids generations from now will have to memorize it: the day the first biracial man of African-American and European-American ancestry took office as the President of the United States.

Almost 2 million people were in Washington D.C., filling the mall all the way from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. I've been in some pretty big crowds on that mall, at anti-war protests in the seventies, but this crowd of every color and every faith was bigger than all of them.

Jason and I watched some of it on streaming video. My computer was not cooperating. We kept losing connectivity every couple of minutes. Finally I shut down the streaming video and listened to President Obama take the oath of office over the radio. I noticed that it got slightly garbled, that Chief Justice Stevens mixed up the words a little bit and got the new President off track. They repeated the oath today, just to be sure.

I liked the inauguration speech. President Obama appealed to the virtues and values we all grew up on. He said we're going to get to work rebuilding America and that we're not going to serve narrow interests any longer. America is not just for the rich.

While he held out the hand of friendship to all nations, he also warned terrorists that they cannot outlast us and we will defeat them. Good strong words, and they are certainly needed now. Just because he is a Democrat and a liberal, there's no reason to think he is going to be a pushover when the nation is in danger.

I'm pleased, also, that President Obama mentioned that we are a nation of many faiths and also of some nonbelievers too. That's probably the first time ever that agnostics and atheists have been given recognition in an inaugural address. That is also a step forward.

We didn't have a television to watch the Inaugural Ball, but I enjoyed viewing the photos on the New York Times website. The Obamas are a beautiful and hot couple, and it's clear from the way they looked at each other and laughed together that they are deeply in love. It's got nothing to do with politics, but it was uplifting to see.

I've said it before: we've broken a barrier that many people thought would never fall down, and the excitement and joy particularly among African-Americans was similar to the joy when the Berlin Wall came down. We haven't abolished racism, that doesn't happen in one single moment. But we've grown up as a nation, and now, the possibilities are infinite.

I wore my Obama 1-20-2009 tee shirt and it felt so good to finally have a President who is going to lead us back to the path of goodwill, compassion, and common sense. To the rule of law, rather than to the rule of expediency. For so long, I was afraid to buy that tee shirt, afraid that Bush would be replaced by someone just like him. But that didn't happen, thank God.

The whole world was watching, and just about all of the world was very happy. Commentators kept mentioning that at such a difficult time, they had never seen so much hope.

Hope alone won't save us, but this man...yes, folks, this late-born Baby Boomer (our day is not over yet) has the power to inspire a new generation to work together. I'm excited to be here to see this and to have the chance to put my energies into the rebuilding we have to do.

Everything but the Kitchen Sink

2009-01-10T07:47:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a strange day full of ups and downs. It began on an unpleasant note. We could not use the kitchen sink because the pipes under the sink were leaking and a flood spread all the way across the floor. Bruce had to mop it up when he woke up at 5 in the morning, because the basin we put underneath the pipe was overflowing. A few hours later when I got up, the basin was overflowing again, and the linoleum was soaked. Water was spread across the floor and even reached the door of Jason’s bedroom. So, I’d made frantic forays downstairs to the superintendent, begging him to come and help.

Now, technically, he doesn’t have to do a thing. We live in a co-op so he’s only responsible for the common areas. If a leak comes down to our apartment from upstairs, it is his job to repair the damage, yet he has often been extremely slow to respond to requests to plaster our bathroom ceiling. We once had a gaping hole in our ceiling for well over a year because he just could not be bothered to come and work on it, and after a while I gave up trying. It took a great deal of persistence to finally get him to come up and seal the hole.

So, I didn’t feel particularly sympathetic to him just because he wasn’t really obligated to fix our leaking faucet. Besides, our apartment is directly over the Board president’s, and that gentleman doesn’t hesitate to complain if something from our apartment bothers him. Once he sent Stanley up to put little felt pads on the bottom of our kitchen chair and table legs, because the slight noise of our chairs being moved disturbed him. Truly, I would not want to put this man in bed with a pea under his mattress!

So I knew that if he got any water coming down from our apartment into his, he would be shrieking at Stanley to do something about it. Armed with that knowledge, I enlisted his wife in the campaign to get Stanley to fix the leak.

It must have worked because Stanley showed up at ten this morning in a totally surly mood. I didn’t realize that he would have to get all the way under the sink to fix it and install a new faucet, so I didn’t remove all the stuff from underneath it when he told me to. He threw everything out onto the floor, and then crawled under the sink. He wouldn’t speak to me and he went in and out of the apartment without saying a word. That’s his typical behavior but this time I sensed there was more anger behind it than simple indifference.

When he was finished, he left without even telling me he was done. I was left with the dilemma of deciding whether or not he deserved a tip. I don’t feel he deserves it, because he did not have to help out yet he agreed to, but then he was obnoxious about it. However, in pragmatic terms, it’s better to catch flies with honey, only in this instance the sweet stuff is green, begins with an “M”, and is not found in beehives.

Once Stanley left, I cleaned up the mess. There were sopping wet shirts and socks we’d left under the sink planning to use them as cleaning rags. But we’d never used them, so I felt no guilt about tossing them out. The rock salt I bought so I could scatter it like Janey Appleseed when I went out on icy days had fused together into one solid and useless lump, so I chucked that too. I tossed the water-damaged items also. I saved the sponges, since they’re supposed to get wet anyway, and left the detergent stains on the dark linoleum, to be mopped up another day. One thing I can say in favor of a leaky faucet, it forced us to mop the kitchen floor.

Once the entire cleanup was done, Jason and I headed out to the Museum of Natural History.

Mosaic, a Novel

2009-01-09T17:02:00.000-08:00

Recently I finished reading Mosaic, a novel by Soheir Khashoggi. It bears similarities to Betty Mahmoody's Not Without My Daughter, the true saga of Mahmoody's escape from Iran with her daughter, against her husband's will. In Mosaic, Dina's husband Karim spirits their two youngest children away to Jordan in the belief that he must do it in order to raise them with proper Muslim family values. After living in New York for decades, he's come to the conclusion that American values are flawed and decadent, and he must take the two younger ones away from their influence before they turn out like their teenage brother Jordy.

Like Mahmoody, the fictional Dina refuses to hand her children over to Karim to raise in a completely different culture. She fears for them, because they are American children in a country where Americans are not liked. Her husband's betrayal shatters her happy life and sets her on a dangerous mission to retrieve her children at any cost.

In her time of need, Dina reaches out to her two best friends, Sarah and Em. The three of them each have a "man" problem. Em, an African-American woman from Louisiana, has an ex who walked out on her and their son 15 years earlier, and has hardly ever contacted his son. Sarah is divorced from her Israeli husband, who refused to give her a get (a Jewish divorce).

Each of these characters is well developed and has her issues move to resolution. But in the meantime, Dina finds herself a professional rescuer of abducted children and travels to Jordan to try to get her twins back. Her in-laws are hostile and suspicious except for her sister-in-law. Karim is overbearing. He's the man and he fully intends to continue doing things his way, whether Dina likes it or not.

The attempt doesn't come off. John Constantine, the rescuer, spots trouble in the form of Karim's security men, and backs off.

Meanwhile, however, Karim is struggling with his own conscience. He'd like to feel wholly self righteous, and he'd like to believe he was acting in his children's best interest, but guilt nags at him. When he sees how unhappy Suzy is, he agrees to let her go home to New York with Dina so long as he can keep Ali. Apparently it is important to him to keep Ali safe from the pernicious influences in America that affected Jordan, their eldest.

The big secret about Jordan: he's gay. That's acceptable here, but in the Muslim world, it's an abomination, unnatural. Karim seems to think that if he keeps Ali in the Muslim culture he can save him from following in his brother's footsteps.

Without giving the whole story away, things reach an acceptable, even hopeful, conclusion, for just about everyone. I found this book a pleasure because it portrayed everyone as a three-dimensional human being with good points as well as flaws. Karim is no one-dimensional villain. He's wrong, by my lights, but he's a real person who can reflect and acknowledge mistakes. These are real people, everyone from his or her own specific background, and their differences make up the beautiful mosaic that the title refers to.

Mosaic is also the name of Dina's business, and part of the marital drift between Dina and Karim is her independence and success as a businesswoman. Karim sees it as taking time away from her family, and in fact he abducts the twins while she is out at work. Mosaic, the novel, raises relevant questions about male/female dynamics, Muslim culture versus mainstream American culture, and ethnic paranoia on both sides of the 9/11 divide. I recommend this book highly.

From Grandmother to Wife

2009-01-05T07:25:00.000-08:00

I've been mistaken for many things in my lifetime. As a girl, I used to be mistaken for my mother by some of her friends. Apparently our voices were almost identical.

Maybe 12 years ago, I took Jason to the pizza shop just outside the Kingsborough College campus. He was seven at the time. He asked for some piece of candy behind the counter, and the proprietor pointed to me and told Jason to "ask Grandma." My hair was going a little gray but I didn't think I looked all that old.

"I'm Mommy!" I huffed. "Grandma is dead!"

Today, Jason arrived at his doctor's appointment half an hour after I received a call that the doctor would not be in today. They asked him, "Did your wife call?"

Not too shabby, in growing 12 years older, I have morphed from Grandma to his Mrs. How's that for growing younger?

New Year's Goals

2008-12-31T18:02:00.000-08:00

I would have liked to compare my New Year's goals to the ones I set out last year, and see which ones were accomplished. But it looks like I didn't make any resolutions last year.

For many years I didn't make New Year's resolutions at all. It's true that most people give up on them pretty quickly and return to life as usual. But then I read that people who succeed have written down their goals. That's a pretty good incentive to write them down.

So here's my list:

1. I've been published a number of times in small publications. This year it's time to break into the better-known and better-paid markets.

2. Today I've taken down one of the barriers that stopped me from selling items on Ebay. Now I'm going to learn how to do that and put up some things we just don't need anymore.

3. I bought a Dana NEO today, a word processor that weighs under 2 pounds and can be toted around anywhere I feel like writing. That's going to be my incentive to write more.

4. I'm going to learn to use the digital camera better and take photos to accompany my articles.

5. I'll take a writing class either online or in person. Maybe more than one, but let's say at least one.

6. I write articles about frugal living but then I'm not so sure I'm as frugal as I'd like to be. I'm going to try to save more money but still have an interesting and varied life.

Let's see which of these I'll have accomplished by this time next year.

Fashion Fantasies

2008-12-31T17:04:00.000-08:00

On December 26th, my birthday, we went to the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. You can't take photos inside the museum, but we wandered into the entrance to the college itself and found an exhibit of fantasy clothing designed by students. There was no restriction on photography there so I snapped a number of photos of humanoid models in clothing that has never been worn on Earth. Some of it couldn't, like the pinata-style garb for a female centaur.

Inside the museum, we viewed the exhibit on "Seduction," a retrospective of erotic male and female garb from the 18th century to today. Jason especially liked a dark green velvet ball gown. It reminded me a bit of the gown Scarlett O'Hara fashioned out of velvet curtains, on her way to seduce Rhett into giving her the tax money (what a coincidence).

I found the Goth exhibit downstairs more interesting. I've always had a fascination for costumes, and these fashions were more like costumes than everyday wear. Black predominated, of course, and the connection to Victorian mourning attire was obvious. Many of the clothes were quite impractical, such as a jacket that came up over the head, and a gown that appeared to have elongated sequins. Upon closer examination, they turned out to be microscope slides, shining against the blood-red gown.

Behind a mirror, there were humanoid models wearing modern street Goth attire. Black leather jackets painted with skulls, and so on. This was more like outfits I'd seen in real life -- only far more artistic.

After this we travelled uptown to try and get into the Museum of Modern Art, but gave up the project when we saw that there were people lined up all around the block. MOMA is free on Friday nights, and this combined with the holiday season drew out a huge crowd. Instead, we headed down to the Village and ate out at the Washington Square Diner.

A Fishy Christmas

2008-12-25T20:52:00.000-08:00

We were supposed to have friends over to discuss the future of healthcare in America this afternoon, but everyone seemed to have something else to do. Fortunately it was a sunny and warmish day (around 50 degrees for a while) and we needed to renew Jason's membership anyway, so it was the perfect way to spend a day that would have otherwise been a downer.

I took 185 photos but deleted a lot of them. Fish and other aquatic animals are always on the move, so it was very hard to get sharp photos of them. The most cooperative critters were the anemones and sea stars that clung to rocks and didn't travel.

This was Bruce's first time seeing not-so-little Akitusaaq, the baby walrus. He's gotten a lot bigger but is still a baby, and he seems to love playing with a white plastic shovel.

It was even warm enough to go to the outdoor show and see Osborn the sea lion do his tricks. Osborn dances and gives sea lion kisses to the kids in the front row.

We had a great time admiring the animals on a day when only a handful of people came to the Aquarium. There were no crowds and it was easy to see anything we chose. It was a fun and relaxing afternoon, just what we needed.

Grand Central Christmas

2008-12-25T20:30:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday we stopped off at Grand Central Station to see the holiday train exhibit at the Transit Museum shop. I always enjoy toy train exhibits but this one had a distinctive New York City flavor and that made it more fun. There was even a stuffed King Kong climbing the model Empire State building.

The buildings, tiny people, checkered cabs and buses on the streets added extra detail and charm. Little children were ringed around the enclosure, their eyes wide. I was one of many adults snapping photos right and left.

After we finished with the train exhibit we walked around Grand Central some more and I took photos of the holiday-themed desserts in Zaro's window. They looked delicious but almost too beautiful to consider eating.

For the finale, we watched the holiday laser show on the station's ceiling. I didn't attempt to photograph this, because it was all moving too fast. After it was over we headed home, having feasted our eyes on this most colorful season.

Sex Trafficking and the New Abolitionists

2008-12-14T17:07:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Bruce and I attended a panel discussion on Sex Trafficking and the New Abolitionists at the Brooklyn Museum. The panelists were Taina Bien-Aime, Executive Director of Equality Now and Rachel Lloyd, Executive Director of GEMS (Girls Education and Mentoring Services), and the panel was moderated by the acclaimed activist, Gloria Steinem.

While it was exciting to see Gloria Steinem in person, we were really there to learn more about the topic and to bring that information back to the Brooklyn Humanist Community in order to figure out what our group can do to help stop sex trafficking and possibly help survivors. We learned that GEMS is the one group in New York State that serves domestically trafficked girls and women.

I learned quite a lot about the sex trafficking problem. The average age of entry into sex trafficking in the U.S. is 13. It is so frequent that there has been a name given to the "Minnesota pipeline" through which young girls and women from Minnesota are brought into the sex trade in NYC through offers of bogus jobs. All around us, this exploitation and enslavement is happening, and yet we often don't even recognize it.

There are actually more people enslaved today than were enslaved during the 19th century, before the Emancipation Proclamation. We're led to believe it is a thing of the past, but it is not.

While the problem is enormous, the panelists and Ms. Steinem reminded us not to sink into hopelessness. It is not inevitable: many societies, especially some of the oldest (hunter/gatherer) societies do not have prostitution or rape. Not only that, but Ms. Steinem pointed out that while one of 3 women will be raped or sexually molested in her lifetime, that does not mean that one of three men is a rapist. The average rapist has attacked 14 women, so clearly it is not typical of men. I'm glad this fact was brought out because in some of the earlier feminist writings I recall the "every man is a potential rapist" argument, and I hardly think it is fair to men.

However, rape and prostitution are the products of a power imbalance. The panelists also scrutinized the idea of consent. 89-94% of prostitutes were sexually abused, often as children. So can they be said to have "consented" to become prostitutes?

Ms. Bien-Aime of Equality Now spoke of the struggle to shut down some of the sex tourism travel agencies in New York City. At first the authorities weren't interested but ironically, Elliott Spitzer was a big help in getting the first one, Big Apple Oriental Tours, shut down. She spoke also of what a betrayal it felt like when former Governor Spitzer was caught up in his involvement with prostitutes.

Ms. Bien-Aime also talked about the efforts to get legislation passed that would decriminalize the women and children who have been forced into prostitution, and punish the traffickers and the customers ("johns") instead. Apparently Sweden passed a model law in 1999 that does just this. Sex trafficking into Sweden has been reduced as a result but, sadly, has increased in neighboring countries.

For many years I thought that legalizing prostitution was a good idea because then the prostitutes would be medically checked and there would be less chance of spreading disease. But the panelists pointed out that in places where prostitution is legal, the exploitation continues. We heard that in Nevada, legal prostitutes are kept in isolated buildings in the desert, behind barbed wire, and the women are not free to leave. They are in debt to the people who own the business, and are overcharged for everything ($5 for a bowl of ramen soup) so that they aren't able to leave.

Furthermore, in Germany, where prostitution is legal, there was a situation where a woman who lost her job was offered a position as a prostitute and told by government officials that if she didn't accept the job she would lose her unemployment benefits! They backtracked after there was a public outcry but it's outrageous that she was given such a "choice" in the first place.

In New York a law has been passed creating a safe harbor for youth who were forced into prostitution, treating them as clients for child welfare rather than slapping them into the juvenile justice system. But there needs to be more awareness, especially now when the precarious economy makes those who are vulnerable to exploitation even more vulnerable.

There are groups springing up, calling themselves new abolitionists and working to stop sex trafficking, but resistance at the top (government officials) has been strong. In India, abolitionists have taken to staging raids on brothels and rescuing women and children out of them.

Ms. Lloyd told us about her own life experience as a survivor of sex trafficking. Her organization, GEMS, educates young survivors to be able to take up other professions, and she stressed that they receive training in lucrative, non-traditional professions, not sewing and waiting on tables.

The GEMS film, "Very Young Girls" was on Showtime last Thursday, and we could probably rent it in order to have a screening and discussion on the issue. We also heard about a movie called "Trade" on the same issue.

It was fascinating to see Gloria Steinem in person after all these years. She was informed and sharp but soft-spoken, simply getting the information out there to us.

This was an excellent learning experience and I hope we will be able to do some work on this issue in the BHC. I didn't get a chance to ask what a small organization like ours can do, but I will look into it.

Whodunit?

2008-12-11T16:19:00.000-08:00

Years ago, I took a class in genre writing with Marvin Kaye. He taught us the formulas for several genres of writing: Science Fiction, Suspense, and Mystery. At that time mysteries seemed more clear cut. There was one body (a character we barely knew and didn't particularly sympathize with), several suspects, and one master detective to put all the clues together.

Today, mysteries have become far more complex. There may be more than one detective at work, and their characters are far better drawn than the detectives of the past (other than Sherlock Holmes that is). Not only that, but there may be more than one criminal at work, and there are almost always multiple bodies.

It makes for more interesting reading than the more straightforward mysteries of the past. I just finished Dr. Death by Jonathan Kellerman. I've been a fan of his Alex Delaware series for quite some time now. This was a convoluted tale, all right. I figured out one of the murderers before he was revealed in the book, and another was obvious, but the third seemed to come completely from left field. I suppose the clues were there, but maybe I missed them.

So is it better for the reader to be able to guess "whodunit" partway through the book, or should we be in suspense until the bad guy/gal is finally revealed? Is it good to feel cleverer than the clever detective, or more satisfying to watch a brilliant mind at work?

I'm glad I figured out the identity of the worst of the killers, but it's also fascinating to be surprised and then groan when the "obvious" clues are recounted. I'm also glad that mysteries are more complex and psychologically engaging than they used to be. They're also more gruesome, but I'll have to take the bad with the good.

Another Publication

2008-12-06T20:38:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I received notification that another of my articles, "Finding a Frugal Mate," will be published in an upcoming issue of "The Dollar Stretcher." When it comes out I will attach the link here.

This is great news because it's my third publication with "The Dollar Stretcher." Now I feel ready to approach some of the better known magazines that pay a higher rate. I have been searching on Writers' Market online for magazines and their guidelines.

With the economy tanking, and several million jobs likely to disappear in the next couple of years, saving money will probably be foremost on a lot of people's minds for some time to come. So I will keep on looking into articles I can write about frugal living.

The Blackest Friday

2008-11-29T08:51:00.000-08:00

I'm so glad I put only minimal effort into the holidays and don't let stress take over. This year I'm doing holiday cards to business associates. Everyone else will get an e-card and that's that.

For Thanksgiving we met our son's best friend and his Dad at a restaurant.

We celebrate Chanukah. It means lighting candles every night for 8 nights. There's a tradition of gifting, but very small gifts each of the 8 days. I've consolidated that and the only person to get that gift is our son.He's getting a gift membership to the Wildlife Conservation Society, which we can sign up for online or we can go in person to one of the zoos and sign up then and there (and go to the zoo free as members that same day). He even gets a free tee shirt.

Even if I were into more gifts, I hope I would never fall into the crass and revolting materialism that resulted in a worker's death at a WalMart yesterday. For people who don't know, the shoppers outside were so eager to snap up the bargains on Black Friday morning that they stormed into the store at 6 AM, tore the doors off the hinges,and trampled a young man working at the store to death.We have a sick society when buying presents at a low, low price, just so the commercialistic holiday greed can go on even in a bad economy, is more important than a human life. I wonder how the revolting jerks who trampled this poor guy can go home and feel content that they bought their cheap presents. (Actually, the store was closed, so I hope nobody got to buy a damn thing, but the cattle were still streaming into the place, lowing for bargains, as EMT workers were trying to revive the murdered man).

This is the end result of "holiday stress," the pressure to buy presents for everyone under the sun, and the greedy gimmes that society has encouraged people to associate with a holiday season that ought to be about something more spiritual and more caring. That applies whether you celebrate Christmas, Chanuka, Kwanzaa, Diwali, or just the Winter Solstice.

So here's MY suggestion for doing away with holiday stress: Stop giving gifts to people in your family, friends, etc. If you have enough disposable income in these times, make a gift to charity. Right now the food pantries are suffering and more people than ever are on the bread lines. If you've got the money to buy gewgaws then you have the money to make charitable gifts in your loved ones' honor. You can do all that online, no waiting in huge crowds at the mall. Best of all, you'll be sharing the holiday spirit with someone who really needs it, and no store workers or other people will have to be sacrificed. (A pregnant woman was taken to the hospital also, but she turned out to be okay).

About that fancy dinner? Go to a soup kitchen and serve holiday dinner to the homeless or the newly poor. Then get with your family and friends for a potluck some other time when there isn't the commercial pressure to compete with Martha Stewart. Lighten your load, help someone in need, and you can forget holiday stress. You'll be helping others and helping yourself: volunteering is good for your health. This holiday, let's change our ways.

Another Train Wreck

2008-11-21T04:28:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading The Glass Castle, a memoir by Jeannette Walls. This was another train wreck about abused and neglected kids. Only this time, the abject poverty wasn't caused by a misguided belief in polygamy, but by an alcoholic father and a self-centered flake of a mother.

I give these kids, Jeannette and her siblings, credit for having the gumption to get the hell out of a horrible situation and flee to New York City. Since they fled in the early seventies, there were still jobs to be had. Three of the four landed on their feet. Oddly, the youngest, who visited other people's homes and got fed there, has been the one who's had the hardest time adjusting.

Ms. Walls may have forgiven her parents but I was less forgiving. From the standpoint of a mother, I could not help but be judgmental about people who failed to feed, properly clothe and house their kids, or even to protect them from danger. That's a parent's job, and these people were the shiftless type that makes a conservative's eyes gleam. Yuppers, they chose to be poor, don't deserve a darn bit of help.

No, they didn't, but their children were helpless victims of their parents' chosen lifestyle, and they most certainly did deserve much more help than they got. Once, a child welfare official came to their home, but there was no follow up. By then the children were well trained to distrust anyone in authority so they wouldn't have told him anything about their living conditions anyway.

Rather than lift a lazy finger to improve their lives, the parents had an excuse and a justification for every one of their failures. If a child got hurt because of the parents' negligence, why, that would just make them strong. Rather than go to the police and complain about a sexual predator who sneaked into the house at night and fondled their daughter, the parents took the attitude of, "See, you are all right. We knew you could deal with it."

These kids wore castoff, junky clothing (not good clothes that were recycled, which would have been fine). They had no food many times and Jeannette described scrounging through the trash after lunch at school, and eating other kids' leftovers. With all their supposed economic troubles, Mom and Dad refused to apply for welfare. They probably knew that their lousy parenting would be exposed and the kids would be hauled off to foster care and a better life. Not that foster care is a picnic, but it would have been better than dumpster diving for dinner.

Whenever some money is found, or the kids save up, the parents misuse it or steal it from their own children. Mommy Worstest buys giant chocolate bars and eats them under the blankets so the kids won't find out. I was glad when her four hungry kids snatched the chocolate away from her and ate it themselves. When the kids find a diamond ring, Mommy decides to wear it instead of selling it for some money to feed her children.

There's mental illness, sure, but the selfishness quotient is extremely high.

Some reviewers have cast doubt on the authenticity of this story. Are there medical records to show that Jeannette really got serious burns by cooking hot dogs unsupervised, at the age of three? Did Daddy Worstest do the "skedaddle" with her, ripping her out of the hospital before she was fully healed? We don't know. It does seem suspicious that, as it comes out at the end, Mommy was sitting on a $1 million parcel of land, and didn't lose it for failure to pay property taxes.

So in the end, I don't know whether it is a true story or a hoax. You see Jeannette's mom in a video on Youtube, and she does look like the bag lady Jeannette says she is. If all this is true, and Jeannette has managed to forgive her parents, she's either a better person than I am, or in major denial. I do wonder about denial, because she writes with such a lack of affect through most of the book. Her first husband "isn't right for her" so she divorces him, but gives us no insight into her feelings about this.

Once I was accused of being a helicopter parent, by a busybody who wasn't a good friend and had no business passing judgment on my child rearing. I think I'm an involved parent, a caring parent, and a strong advocate for my son. If that makes me a helicopter parent, so be it. Yes, I homeschooled Jason for four years, as the Walls parents supposedly homeschooled their kids. But I took it seriously and abided by the state regulations. Yes, we bought hand me downs at the thrift store, but they fit properly, they weren't full of rips and holes, and by golly, all his winter coats zipped or buttoned up to keep him warm.

If there was a problem at school I went in and politely dealt with the issue. Yeah, Rex Walls would have shown up at the school, but he would have been drunk and his belligerence would have only made things worse. Parenting involves sacrifice. Parenting involves watching over your child, taking care of basic needs, taking care of health. These parents failed in all these areas.

So I'm not real impressed with Rex Walls for taking Jeannette into the desert at night and giving her Venus for her Christmas present. Maybe that was a bright spot in her childhood. In an otherwise normal childhood, it would have been a sweet, nonmaterialistic gift. But in this case, it was just a way of being "creative" when the man's pockets were empty, through every fault of his own. And if he'd been smarter he would have used that idea to sell deeds to the stars, just like some company is doing today. Makes a great Christmas gift, and you can even put food on the table.

Parallel Lines

2008-11-14T12:53:00.000-08:00

Wednesday night, Bruce, Jason and I watched Nina Davenport's 2003 film, "Parallel Lines." We were previewing it for possible use at a movie night with the Brooklyn Humanist Community.

For that purpose, "Parallel Lines" flunked the test. It was solid documentary where I expected a bit more of a story line from a "docudrama." Still, although it reached no solid conclusions, it was a road movie that captured the thoughts and emotions of so many different Americans.

Some were deeply affected by 9/11, even from thousands of miles away. Others hadn't even heard about the attack until several days later, and it didn't impact much on their emotions or their everyday lives. But for most people, it evoked feelings about loss and sorrow in their own personal histories.

Nina Davenport seemed fearless as she trekked across America, taking the scenic route in order to arrive in New York City in time for New Year's Eve in Times Square. She entered strangers' homes, took boat rides with them, got into their cars to film their responses as they drove. She did, in short, all the things our parents warn us not to do. Yet, she emerged unscathed from all this risky behavior, her deepest wound being the personal sense of loss 9/11 brought out in New York residents.

Ms. Davenport encountered so many lonely people, the entire cast of "Eleanor Rigby." Talking about 9/11 brought out personal tragedies: the mother whose children were taken from her, the flea market man mourning his father's death the week before, the cowboy whose mother had killed his violent father. Davenport stopped in Oklahoma City to speak with a woman who'd escaped death in the Oklahoma City bombing only because she was sick and not at work that day. Her survivor guilt is a mirror for all those who were absent or late to work on 9/11, while their colleagues and friends perished.

Sometimes she encountered negative attitudes: the man who said, what does the United States expect, we've done things like this to people in so many other countries, did we really think it would never happen here? She encounters an elderly black man who is so suspicious that he nearly calls the police on her just for being someone he doesn't recognize. But then he realizes she is not out to hurt anyone, and he invites her into his ramshackle home to tell her his story.

In D.C., suspicion runs rampant. Davenport is nearly arrested for driving around with her camcorder mounted on the roof of her car. She explains over and over that she's making a road movie and the camcorder is filming the view of the open road. Not having any of it, the police tell her to move along. She decides it is high time to get herself back to New York City, the place where she belongs.

Arriving back in NYC on New Year's Eve, Davenport joins the crowds in Times Square, under much heavier security than ever before. But the crowd sees the police as friends and protectors, and when the ball drops at midnight, the police receive loving hugs from the assemblage.

In the final scene, Davenport goes to Ground Zero. Unable to directly look at the wreckage of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, she films a pigeon on the sidewalk and then films the facial expressions of people as they return from the viewing platform. A fellow photographer breaks down in tears and tells her that he, too, needs to keep some distance from looking directly at the destruction. And thus it ends.

It was a moving film, funny at times, but more often sad. We don't reach a conclusion or a satisfying wrap up. Instead, we're left to make sense of the senselessness of the attack, just as we were in real life.

We Did It!

2008-11-06T07:15:00.000-08:00

Listening to the election returns Tuesday night was such a joy. I went into it unsure. Some people were saying that Obama was ahead in the polls. From other sources, I heard that the polls were tightening and the outcome was not so sure.

It's been a long time since I felt the stakes were this high. Maybe all the way back to Nixon's election in 1968 and again in 1972. This time it was different. This time I took an active role in the campaign. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, I was involved in the anti-war movement, but not in the presidential campaigns.

So this was my first experience with working on a presidential campaign. What a sense of excitement there was. I received multiple emails every day asking for donations, and I gave more than I originally planned to because they were so well crafted. Now, I think I'll go fish some of them out of my "old mail" box and keep them as examples of writing that made me whip out the credit card.

Then I began to feel that giving wasn't enough. I wanted to take part in the many phone calling efforts. The first one I responded to was a phone bank at the UAW. I wrote about that and about the chirpy old lady who saw no need for change. In the few weeks that followed, Bruce and I also went to a Move.On party in Brooklyn and a phone bank at the Shorefront Democratic Club in Coney Island. I also tried some phone calling from home, but somehow that wasn't as motivating as sitting in a roomful of other people who were also making calls.

We finished up with another phone bank at the UAW, but I reached none of the target people on November 3rd. Still, I did reach some people and hoped I did some good even if they were relatives of the person I intended to reach.

Tuesday evening I was restless and nervous. I started listening to the radio around 7 PM and listened for the next 5 hours.

The first few returns were pretty predictable. But then Pennsylvania, a battleground state, came in for Obama! That was excellent. The radio announcers were saying this was a very good sign, but they also said it was still possible for McCain to pull an upset.

When Ohio came in it was practically a lock. I woke Bruce up and told him Ohio went for Obama and we high fived each other. After that Bruce stayed up to hear the rest of the returns. Now it was looking extremely good. In order for McCain to win, the announcers said, something really extraordinary would have to happen. I prayed that nothing like that would happen.

My prayers were answered when, at 11 PM, the West Coast came in for Obama as predicted. Not only that, but Obama won Indiana, which hasn't deviated from the Republicans in a generation, and also Florida and Virginia. He not only won, but got something close to twice the electoral votes McCain garnered. That's a landslide in my book!

I wasn't watching on streaming video, which was surely available somewhere on the internet, but we were hearing the reactions, the cheering crowds, people breaking down in tears because they never thought a man with African American ancestry would become President in their lifetimes.

What a joyous moment and what a triumph for us all. It doesn't mean racism is gone, but it means that as a country we've begun to grow up. This time around, the majority of Americans wasn't fooled by all the smearing and the guilt-by-association that was hurled at Obama. Their concerns, the economy, the war, etc., are better served by Obama's plans and ideals than McCain's, and they made their choice without listening to negativity and outright lies.

What a relief and what a breath of fresh air. Now, instead of struggling against the odds as they have for 8 years, organizations looking to bring about positive change will have an easier road ahead of them. Now some of the energy we had to expend in fighting an administration determined to destroy the advances of women, minorities, etc., we'll be able to work WITH the new administration to continue the momentum of positive change.

What a blessing, and truly, God did help those who helped themselves. Change did not come from the top, change came from the bottom up, ordinary people working together in extraordinary ways, making calls, posting on blogs, using Web 2.0 (which I know very little about) to spread the word about President-Elect Barack Obama. This happened thanks to the people who drove to other states to knock on doors and canvass, thanks to so many people who made the time and made the energy to open the door to change and healing for a country that has been so damaged by 8 years of Republican rule.

I know my efforts changed one person's vote. My appeal to her was not a lofty one: I pointed out that McCain had plans to privatize social security and to cut Medicare. That made the difference. But once she went ahead and voted for Obama, she felt more empathy for the African-Americans she saw weeping with joy when the election was called at 11 PM. "I saw how much it meant to them," she said. This was the same woman who told me, a few days earlier, that she could never vote for a black man!

A rabbi once said that if you save a single life it is as if you have saved the world. Did changing one vote save the world? I don't know, but millions of us out there did the same thing, and changed some people's minds.

Now we all have a huge mess to sort out, and Obama is not going to have an easy time of it. We'll need patience, we'll need to be willing to make some sacrifices, and we'll need to keep up our energy to do the work that needs to be done.

But finally...we have that chance. Yes, America, Yes We Did!!

Election Day

2008-11-04T05:16:00.000-08:00

So here it finally is, the Election Day that will make history, no matter what happens.

I was at my neurotic best after seeing photos of 8 hour lines for the early voting in other states. So I insisted that we all get up at 4:30 AM and be at the polls by 5:30, even though voting doesn't start until 6 AM. I expected the doors to be locked but they were open and a kindly poll worker allowed us to wait inside and to use the bathroom before the official opening at 6.

A few people tried to cut the line in front of us and I objected. The woman's excuse was that we aren't all going to the same Election District. That may be, but we were still something like 3rd in line and I wasn't going to be moved back by people who came in after us. Fortunately she grumbled but gave in.

At about 6 a number of people came in and the line was just about to the door but I don't think it extended outside. We proceeded to the correct ED and put Jason ahead of us because he had to be at school and needed to get on the subway by about 6:30.

They gave Jason his card and he went in and wasn't able to pull the lever. That's because the machine wasn't properly turned on yet. One of the women at our table didn't even know that the light is supposed to be on, that's what shows the machine is working.

Someone else came over and fixed it and Jason was able to vote. He waited while Bruce and I took care of voting.

Meanwhile, this woman at our table was showing just how ignorant she was. It is amazing that they allowed her to be a poll worker, but I have been through the training and I know that they will take anyone who has a pulse. They give you a few hours of training, and then they give you an open book test during which you are allowed to look up the correct answer. Naturally everyone passes! A bonobo could take a few minutes off from mating with his female relatives, and pass that exam!

This particular woman didn't know how to turn on the machine...even though they teach that at the training. Then she was asked to write up the cards while looking up the names in the book. Oh my, that was just too hard for her. The other woman, who had more smarts, wrote up my card, #3. Then this bozo put my name on card #4. I sure hope my vote isn't disqualified just because this woman is brain dead. I did not vote twice, but it will look like that at the end of the day unless the smarter poll worker tore up card #4.

Then Ms. Ignorant complained that she couldn't write up the cards and look up the names in the book at the same time. She threatened to quit on the spot because she was being expected to do "all that at once." Another poll worker basically told her to shut up, she wasn't going to leave.

I foresee some problems in my election district today, because this woman couldn't even handle the situation when there were only 5 people on line waiting to vote. Just wait until later today when a huge crowd shows up after work. They'll probably have to haul her off in a strait jacket.

Anyhow, I am very glad we voted early, and my fingers are crossed for Obama and all the Democrats. This country has suffered for 8 years and it is surely time for a big breath of fresh air.

Halloween photos

2008-11-04T05:10:00.000-08:00

Jason as "Cousin Itt" and Adriana as Mother Goose

Antoinette as Devil Woman, Michael as Rastaman, Celeste & Bruce as Gomez and Morticia Addams

Graveyard Cake

Party Tomorrow

2008-10-31T18:35:00.000-07:00

We've got the food ready. Tomorrow we'll do the Big Cleanup and then our guests should start arriving around 4 PM. I'm still a little hung up about my costume but I guess I will get it figured out. Jason wants to be Cousin Itt from the Addams Family. I bought him a long wig and figure he can turn it around or else just drape the hair over his face and wear it that way. It will probably tickle and he'll probably get tired of it before too long, but we shall see!

The food is just about ready. We're having:

Vegetarian Chili (in honor of Day of the Dead) & rice
Deviled Eggs (obvious, I hope)
Pepperoni, cheese and crackers
Chips, pretzels and dips
Putrified Pie (mostly sugar-free pudding pie, with a layer of chocolate covered by green butterscotch pudding)
Graveyard cake over Castrated Brownies
Halloween candy (candy corn and gummy worms)
Vampire Blood punch with frozen body parts
Soda
Coffe & Tea

We may also receive some Turkey Balls. The brownies will be happy to hear about that.

I've put up a miniature Day of the Dead altar with photos of our deceased loved ones: my parents, Bruce's parents, Richard, Janet, Beth, Rosanne, Nancy, and our late cat George. I also put up some skull decorations with various slogans like "Please DO feed the ancestors," "Dead Head" (on the bathroom door), "Abandon Soap, All Ye Who Enter Here," on one of Jason's bedroom doors, and a fire-breathing dragon saying, "Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste great with ketchup!" on the other. Tomorrow afternoon I will put the last one, "You are entering the Dead Zone," on the door to our apartment.

There are skeletons in the hall closets, one saying, "Shhh, I'm trying to hide!" and the other saying, "Shh, don't tell on me!" Another decoration is shaped like a tombstone and reads, "Graveyard Vote." Okay, so it is four days before Election Day and a little political humor is not inappropriate!

For goody bags, I've made up "Anti-Vampire Kits." They contain a head of garlic, several toothpicks (wooden stakes to drive through a vampire's heart) and a Blood Donor card to prove you've already given!

Tomorrow I will post photos!

Democracy is Dead in NYC

2008-10-24T09:51:00.000-07:00

The City Council just caved in to Mayor Bloomberg and voted that he can run for a third term. They disregarded the voice of the people in not one, but two referendums where we voted for a two-term limit.

Honestly, I don't care if he gets to run again if it is done right: another referendum by the people. But this little power play completely circumvented the voters. We should now punish those who think democracy is not for us "little people." I want the list of all those who voted in favor of Bloomberg's ploy, and I'll make sure to put it up on this blog and encourage everyone reading it to vote AGAINST every one of these pathetic sycophants. And of course, let's make sure Bloomberg is soundly defeated.

I hear there was intimidation from Bloomberg's camp. Well, people who have principles know how to stand up to and refuse to be intimidated. Sorry, no excuses. Was a continuing seat on the Council more important than our basic democratic principles? People have given their lives for democracy, but giving up a council seat is too great a sacrifice? For shame!

As for those brave enough to say NO to this highjacking of the popular will, we should reward them by making sure they are voted in again, providing their term limits aren't up.

The Giver

2008-10-22T05:29:00.000-07:00

I've just finished reading The Giver by Lois Lowry. I have to admit it was beautifully written and sucked me in from the very first page. I finished the entire book in one evening, all 179 pages.

So kudos to Ms. Lowry for her excellent, suspenseful writing. But the story line..well, the words "trite" and "overdone" came to mind. It seems to me that ever since I was a child I've been reading books about communities that instill mindless conformity and manipulate reality in order to keep the population under control. This is just another of those stories, even if the writing is outstanding.

I could name several books this one reminded me of. It's not as brutally coercive as 1984, but there's recommended physical punishment of young children and the elderly. There are endless rules that even restrict one's use of language. Jonas is scolded for his use of a vague, meaningless term like "love." One of the rules is to use language "precisely." Thus, exaggeration for effect, such as saying one is starving when really just hungry, is cause for reprimand. This reminded me very much of the manipulation of language through Newspeak in 1984.

Those who don't conform, die. That's a pervasive theme throughout many of these dystopian novels. Certainly it is central in 1984 and also in Logan's Run (where it is a capital offense to turn 30 years old without presenting oneself for immediate termination). "Release" is the euphemism for state-sanctioned murder here. But it is treated as something positive (similar to Brave New World, where children visited the hospices and were given ice cream on the day someone died), and the polite fiction that the "released" persons are sent "Elsewhere" is maintained.

The ugly secret is that not just the elderly are put to death (which is bad enough), but anyone who doesn't fit in, even the smaller of a set of twins or a baby who is fretful at night, can be "released" if the community decides this is necessary. Jonas discovers to his horror that his "father" (no child is raised by his or her biological parents) who appears to adore children, is capable of casually murdering newborn infants, all the while talking to them in the same cheerful patter as if he were nurturing them. Irony of ironies, his profession is called Nurturer!

Meanwhile, Jonas is being trained to become the next Receiver of Memory. This is an important position because the community has chosen to forget many things: love, family, strong emotions of any kind, any kind of suffering, and even colors and music, in order to remain safe and comfortable. They have given up way too much, it is abundantly clear. But Jonas, under his training by the former Receiver, now the Giver, is rediscovering the memories of ecstatic pleasure and unspeakable pain, and he comes to the realization that his community has given up too much. If he leaves, the memories he has received will be released and his community will have to experience and deal with them. They will therefore be forced out of their conformist complacency and made to face the realities of life again.

What happens at the end? It's not clear whether Jonas, escaping with little Gabriel, a baby scheduled for release because he cries too much at night (colicky babies beware!) finds a community living the way we do, with love, with family, with all the attendant pleasures and pains of existence, or whether he and the baby perish in the first real snow he has ever seen.

I also felt this book has its roots in the propaganda movies of the fifties. I saw similarities to movies like "It Came From Outer Space," and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The people in Jonas's community have given up so much and are living in such color-blind and tone-deaf conformity to the "Rules," which govern them to the point where no one makes an independent choice of mate or profession, that they appear as soulless as the Pod People. Is Lowry striking out at "Godless Communism?" Probably not but her use of a Christmas tree in the loving family scene Jonas "remembers" suggests that part of her objection to the conformity of the community includes their jettisoning of Christianity in favor of rules that restrict their every action, every word and every thought.

I am sure we will have a great discussion because even though the subject matter is in fact overplayed and has been done many times before, the details of the story will give us plenty to talk about. This book is only 15 years old and I can't help thinking that Lowry borrowed her ideas from the dystopian classics. However, she certainly did do an excellent job of it.

Setting the Record Straight

2008-10-22T05:28:00.000-07:00

I did not author yesterday's list of 5 reasons to keep working for the Obama campaign. They were sent to me in an email, which I have now discarded. The sender encouraged everyone receiving it to please post it on our blogs. They were clearly less interested in a byline than in getting the message out.

Top 5 Reasons to Keep Working for Obama

2008-10-21T04:33:00.000-07:00

I'm making no secret of the fact that my family supports Obama for President. Bruce and I have done two phone-calling parties, and we are doing another on November 3rd. But I feel as if I should do more.

Especially right now that Sen. Obama has had to suspend his campaign to visit his gravely ill grandmother in Hawaii, this is not the time to rest on laurels.

TOP 5 REASONS OBAMA SUPPORTERS SHOULDN'T REST EASY
1. The polls may be wrong. This is an unprecedented election. No one knows how racism may affect what voters tell pollsters—or what they do in the voting booth. And the polls are narrowing anyway. In the last few days, John McCain has gained ground in most national polls, as his campaign has gone even more negative.
2. Dirty tricks. Republicans are already illegally purging voters from the rolls in some states. They're whipping up hysteria over ACORN to justify more challenges to new voters. Misleading flyers about the voting process have started appearing in black neighborhoods. And of course, many counties still use unsecure voting machines.
3. October surprise. In politics, 15 days is a long time. The next McCain smear could dominate the news for a week. There could be a crisis with Iran, or Bin Laden could release another tape, or worse.
4. Those who forget history... In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote after trailing by seven points in the final days of the race. In 1980, Reagan was eight points down in the polls in late October and came back to win. Races can shift—fast!
5. Landslide. Even with Barack Obama in the White House, passing universal health care and a new clean-energy policy is going to be hard. Insurance, drug and oil companies will fight us every step of the way. We need the kind of landslide that will give Barack a huge mandate.

Exciting Times

2008-10-18T18:10:00.000-07:00

There's an old curse that goes, "May you live in interesting times." Of course it doesn't make much sense because the person uttering that curse would presumably live through those same interesting times.

We're living through a very "interesting" time in the outside world, what with a hotly contested and historical presidential election, and with the economy falling apart around us.

But that's not what I meant. I'm talking about exciting times that are worthwhile and even fun. Today we helped out at a flea market for the Brooklyn Humanist Community. I have to admit I had misgivings at first and was afraid we would not have enough people to take care of the table. But it all worked out and we actually took in enough to increase our treasury by 26%. That moves us closer to our goal of incorporating as a nonprofit, so as the button I picked up at Fundraising Day in New York says, "501(c)(3), Baby!"

Tomorrow Bruce and I are doing another calling party for Obama. This is the first time I've ever gotten this involved in a political campaign. The stakes are very high. I don't want to see us living through another four years of the same policies that President Bush followed, which have led us into a costly, tragic and unnecessary war, and into a financial crisis that comes close to the start of the Great Depression in 1929. So for once we are contributing to Obama's campaign and taking an active role in it.

Monday I'm hoping to get the next grant proposal for the War Resisters League out in the mail, and on Tuesday I'm volunteering at The Hetrick-Martin Institute. Tuesday night is Simchas Torah and four of my cousins on Mom's side, the Greek side of the family, are going to the Greek synagogue on the Lower East Side for services. This will be my first time in a Greek synagogue for a service.

So it will be an exciting few days, and I'm looking forward to them!

Adventures in Phone Banking for Obama

2008-10-13T20:13:00.000-07:00

Tonight Bruce and I made phone calls for Obama. At a book fair last month, I got some literature from the National Writers' Union and signed their mailing list. They contacted me asking if I'd be willing to make phone calls for Obama, and we offered to help out tonight and also on November 3rd for a last minute "get out the vote" push.

Tonight we called people who supposedly belonged to "Workers for America," to give them some information about Obama and find out which way they were inclined to vote. Undecided voters would receive a bit more of a spiel in hopes of swaying their decision.

For the most part the calls went fine. A few people hung up on me, but others were delighted, so that was no big deal. Some people professed never to have heard of "Workers for America," which made me wonder why they were listed as members. A couple of the calls were real doozies.

One woman was all excited when I told her Workers for America supports Obama for President. She squealed that she's voting for Michelle Obama because she is Barack's best asset. That was actually a great conversation. This woman isn't letting the fact that she just had a double mastectomy get her down. She's out there and participating.

Then there was the woman who became incensed when I said Barack Obama will fight for all Americans. She told me she was shocked that I could even say such a thing, and followed this up with, "You aren't even an American. I bet you're from Russia, you Communist!"

Uh, yeah, with this native Noo Yawk accent? I hardly think so. Nope, lady, the Russians are next door, but I'm not one of them. But, I can see Brighton Beach, otherwise known as Little Odessa, from my house!

The weirdest conversation I had was with a chirpy old lady named Alice. She was named well, because folks, this lady is from Wonderland all right. She told me that everything is wonderful, she and her husband have a business, they've always worked hard, and they have a lovely house..all her nieces and nephews went to college and have big houses and cell phones and what have you.

By this time I had a fair idea but I still wanted to know how this translated into a political philosophy. It sure was hard to get an answer out of this lady. On and on she babbled about how life is beautiful, and what's there to change, why is Obama talking about change?

Why would anyone want to change anything, life is just beautiful? Oh, war can be "unpleasant" (!) but you have to look at all the good things..they never thought America was bad.

Okay, so the economy is one big roller coaster scarier and more painful than Space Mountain in Disney World, and we've spent how many trillions on a war that was based on lies? But everything is great and there's no need for change.

Psst, Alice. I don't know what kind of drugs you are on, but can I have some too?

Halloween Party Coming Up

2008-10-07T04:18:00.000-07:00

Because Halloween is my favorite holiday, I nudged Bruce to set our wedding date on Halloween back in 1987. That year it fell on a Saturday night, and I just knew it was the right time for us to marry.

After all, with all the ghouls and goblins in people's windows, and the grinning pumpkins on their lawns, it's hard to forget an anniversary card. And there's always a parade or a party to go to.

It's clear to me that I have a thing for costumes. Look at the events I enjoy the most: the Mermaid Parade, Circus Amok, Medieval faires, and Halloween. Each and every one involves people in costume.

This year, Halloween falls on a Friday night, which isn't so good for parties. People are tired after work. Oh, maybe not the 20-somethings, but when you get to the 50-somethings, yes. Saturday night, November 1st, is a much better bet. Besides, we can celebrate three ways: Halloween, our 21st wedding anniversary, and the Mexican holiday, Day of the Dead.

I enjoy the philosophy of Day of the Dead. Obviously, it's linked to Halloween because both center around All Saints Day. But although they both feature skeletons, the Day of the Dead is a cheerful celebration of the deceased ancestors. People put up beautiful altars with all their loved ones' favorite things. They go to the cemeteries and picnic on the graves, and then leave fruit and other goodies for their ancestors to feast upon. The skeletons are portrayed as being happy, enjoying the same activities they enjoyed in this life. In other words, the afterlife is very much a continuation of this life with all the same pleasures available to the "dead."

So this year we are throwing a party on November 1st (which, coincidentally, was also Bruce's Dad's birthday), and we will especially welcome Mexican foods. I'm debating what costume I will wear, but sorry, I'm not telling yet! You'll have to wait until after the party to find out. Naturally, there will be photos.

A Strange Day

2008-10-04T18:07:00.000-07:00

This was a strange and frustrating day. It started out with Jason having a minor procedure on his toenail. When we got him home we decided to go to a calling party to get out the vote for Obama in the swing states. I signed up at the last minute but we proceeded to the party anyway.

At the Sheepshead Bay station we ran into an unexpected delay. Suddenly we noticed a number of Transit Police on the station. A Q train pulled in halfway and slowed to a stop. There were a lot of people waiting on the platform by this time, and we all looked onto the tracks to see what was wrong.

A very pretty Siamese cat was sitting quietly near the tracks. It didn't get up and dash away, which suggested it was either sick or hurt. The Transit policeman climbed down onto the tracks to try and retrieve it.

The cat was of course hurting and terrified, and it tried to bite and scratch the policeman. It was clearly injured because it could only scuttle away on damaged hind legs, but it still managed to put out its claws and try to defend itself.

The policeman was stumped. Someone handed him a canvas bag to try and capture the cat, but instead the cat clung to it. He tried to lift it up onto the platform but the cat let go and fell back to the ground, probably hurting its injured legs even more.

I called out to the policeman and told him to get the cat by the scruff of the neck when it struck out at the canvas bag. He did, and sure enough the cat was caught and pulled off the tracks. Its legs and tail were injured. I suppose it may have been hit by a train while jumping out of the way.

We got on the train then and went to the city. The building was a beautiful old apartment house on the West Side Highway. The calling party was supposed to take place in one of the penthouses. That would have been something to see! But unfortunately we signed up at the last minute and apparently the hosts decided it wasn't worth it to hold the party with so few people attending. So they went out, and we cooled our heels a little while and then gave up.

I'd also been invited to an introductory Esperanto class so I thought we would head to the general area and see if we could spot the right building. It was taking place at a Zaro's Bakery. Unfortunately, what I remembered just was not the right address. So we ended up walking up to 34th Street and coming home.

I wrote to a local Sheepshead Bay blogger and asked if he would mention the injured cat in his blog. The cat was taked up to the animal hospital on E. 62nd Street most likely, so I hoped that if he publishes this the owner may come forward. Siamese cats aren't strays. Someone out there must miss that poor kitty.

Here's hoping tomorrow will be more satisfying and productive.

Sundays at Tiffanys

2008-10-01T18:07:00.000-07:00

Sundays at Tiffanys surprised me. I've read many books by James Patterson, part mystery and part thriller. They are definitely page turners. So I wasn't prepared for this sweet romantic tale about a young woman who had an imaginary friend when she was young, and meets him again as an adult. Apparently imaginary friends aren't so imaginary after all. They are similar to guardian angels, assigned to take care of children, but unlike angels that stay with you your whole life, imaginary friends leave when the child turns 9.

Most children forget their imaginary friends and go on with their lives but for some reason Jane does not. And then when she finds him again, in the flesh, she recognizes him at once. More than an imaginary friend, he becomes more and more human until it is clear that he is her one true love.

It's written so simply that I wondered if I had picked up a "Young Adult" book by mistake, but no. It was James Patterson, showing a completely different side of himself. Sundays at Tiffanys was a quick read and a good one.

Medieval Faire Photos

2008-09-30T21:15:00.000-07:00

There were dragons. There were pirates. There were knights in chain mail and shining armor. There were men in kilts, ladies in medieval gowns. Minstrels sang, blacksmiths plied their trade, and craft vendors of all descriptions hawked their wares. It rained when we first arrived and again when we were leaving, but for several hours it cleared and we were able to enjoy the Ft. Tryon Park medieval faire.

We saw jousting and swordplay but what I liked best were the costumes. The Society for Creative Anachronism was there and we had a nice chat with them. Some people fashioned their own medieval costumes, like the man who painstakingly linked 16,000 aluminum rings together to make a suit of chain mail. There were people of all ages, from a 3 month old baby in a tiny jester's cap, to an elderly lady dressed like a queen.

There were enough dragons, carved, painted and tee shirts, to feed Jason's appetite. There was an artist who did "butt sketches" of people, seen from the back. I saw some fun tee shirts:

Come to the dark side, we have cookies

I sacked Isengard and all I got was this lousy tee shirt

Ninjas? Pirates? A Jedi fears not these things

The food was plentiful. For $10 we received huge portions of chicken breast, and two side dishes plus a huge piece of bread. The chicken was actually way too much to eat in one sitting. I ate about half, saved some between the bread (folded in half it still was big enough for a sandwich), and threw some of it out. I don't like to waste food but I wasn't going to stuff myself silly either.

We met a very young Robin Hood. He's exactly the guy we need now, with the mess our economy is in. Too bad he wasn't old enough to run for President!

Years ago I used to attend the Renaissance Faire in Tuxedo, New York. This event was free whereas the fair in Tuxedo is pretty expensive. Yet I didn't see that much of a difference, which made this a terrific value. Now that we've discovered it I'll make it a point to come back next year.

What a train wreck!

2008-09-24T05:09:00.001-07:00

No, I'm not talking about a subway collision. I'm talking about Shattered Dreams, the book we are going to discuss at the next BHC book club meeting.

Warning: Spoilers Ahead!

It's about Irene Spencer, a woman who grew up in a polygamist cult right here in the United States. She was brainwashed into believing in "The Principle" as the most important of God's commandments: to be polygamous and bear as many children as possible. The rationale behind this seemed to be that the man who creates a huge family with 7 or more wives will be some sort of mini-god in the afterlife and will rule over some other planet, with his wives and children exalted along with him. Those who don't live the polygamous life, women that is, can't be pulled through the veil by their husbands, so they end up as "angels," lonely forever in eternity.

Using this as a justification, the children were indoctrinated to believe they must live in a polygamous marriage. And Irene followed the rules even though she did not agree, and was made miserable by "doing God's will." She ended up in a polygamous marriage of over 7 wives, more than 50 children altogether fathered by one man, Verlan LeBaron. Not only did she suffer the pangs of jealousy and loneliness (which these cultists claimed was a sin), she also endured back breaking work raising her own 13 children and often taking care of the other kids by other wives.

Because no one man can possibly support such a family on an ordinary salary, and Verlan was no Trump or Rockefeller, Irene and her c0-wives endured terrible poverty. They lived in places like Mexico and Nicaragua to avoid detection in the U.S. which enforces anti-polygamy laws more stringently. Often they lived without running water, without indoor toilets, in incomplete houses or even in refurbished chicken coops.

Even with the obvious suffering and the patent absurdity of trying to live this lifestyle and give one's children adequate love and attention, not to mention getting love and attention from one man who rotates his schedule to spend time with each wife, Irene was expected to put a happy face on it and pretend in public that she was thrilled to be living in lonely, degraded squalor for the sake of celestial glory.

Although she argued and tried to fight back as the humiliations grew worse and worse, Irene never quite got up the gumption to walk away permanently from the train wreck of a polygamous life. And here's where I am afraid I have to lose a bit of sympathy for her and begin blaming the victim.

If no one in her life had encouraged her to think outside the cage, I'd have to concede that her brainwashing was so complete that it might absolve her of the responsibility to take control of her own life. But that was not the case, and here's where I just don't get it. Her mother was made miserable in polygamy, and encouraged Irene to break away from it. At 15, Irene had a boyfriend named Glen, a man in his 20's, who loved her dearly and wanted to marry her -- monogamously.

Despite her mother's urging and Glen's adoration, she fell right into the trap. Personally, I think she dug her own grave and should have gone with Glen when she had the chance. Yes, her sister and brother in law (later her husband) intervened, but she had no backbone and no guts. She walked out of Glen's house where she'd been holding his hand and planning their future, and then meekly and stupidly got into the car with Verlan and Charlotte (his first wife and her half-sister), and ended up marrying Verlan.

Throughout all the deprivation, loneliness and poverty, as the humiliations mounted each time Verlan put another woman before her, Irene didn't gather up the gumption to walk away. She finally told Verlan she was going to leave him. But was she, really? We'll never know, because Verlan was killed in a car accident. If this wasn't a memoir, I'd call that a cheap use of Deus ex Machina to help her escape when she didn't have the courage to do it herself.

Oh, yes, part of her excuse was that in her cult, a wife was free to leave but the husband "owned" the children. What nonsense. Other than Charlotte, none of the other wives were legally married to Verlan. They could have picked themselves up and taken the children with them, and the "husband" would have had no legal recourse whatever. In fact this legalism was exploited by these families, who got the mothers and their children on welfare claiming to be "single mothers" who somehow got pregnant again every year.

And then when Verlan died, Irene went through intense mourning for "a wonderful human being." What wonderful human being, may I ask? Oh, he was brainwashed too, but in his case the brainwashing worked in his favor. But this was the man who would only make love to her once a month and not when she was pregnant or after menopause (though she was able to beg enough to get him to break with his principles just a little bit). This was the man who forced her to "give away" subsequent brides to him in the polygamous marriage ceremony. He even took her wedding ring and put it on the finger of one of his subsequent wives. So her deep mourning for him just doesn't ring true. He wasn't in her life often enough to warrant it, even though he was her "husband" for well over 20 years.

Irene escaped the misery of polygamy by an accident, and she later became a born again Christian. She is now in a monogamous marriage that she never would have had if her "husband" had lived. I'm glad she is living the life she always wanted and receiving all of one man's love, but she is no heroine. Yes, she wrote her memoir and she speaks out about the realities of polygamy but I would respect her a lot more if she had stiffened her spine all those years ago and married her first love.

September 11th

2008-09-15T12:44:00.000-07:00

I had to wait a few days before approaching this subject. Every year it is like pulling a bandaid off a wound that hasn't fully healed, and it wells up and bleeds again.

People were going about their business. I went to HMI and did some volunteer data entry. I tried to put on the streaming video of the memorial ceremony but the computer's speakers weren't on and I couldn't figure out how to turn them on. So I gave it up.

After the volunteering, I ate lunch out, and then walked to Union Square, where I listened to a few minutes of the September Concert, an effort to fill the skies with music every September 11th. The music was pleasant but I didn't feel satisfied with that. Somehow the symbolic gestures just aren't reaching me the way they once might have. I remember people creating paper cranes for peace, and wondering back then just what effect on the real world this could possibly have.

September 11, 2001 was one of those days that stands out in my mind forever, not unlike the day JFK was shot a month before my 9th birthday. When it all actually happened I was sleeping. It was Jason's fourth day back at school after being homeschooled for four years. I was getting him accustomed to walking or taking the train to school by himself. So that morning I walked him halfway, and then returned home. I had a brief phone conversation and by 8:30 AM I lay down to take a morning nap.

While I was sleeping, the world changed forever. I had a dream while I was asleep, and I believe it had to do with the attack on the World Trade Center.

September 11th is also the anniversary of my Mom's death in 1995. I'd never had a visitation from her on the anniversary of her death, but this time she appeared in my dream, standing up and walking on her own without a cane or walker. She looked much younger than the almost-79 years she had accumulated at the time of her death, and she was cheerful and smiling. She wore a hot pink tunic and pants outfit she bought in the 1970's, that I still have today. Also in the dream, she hugged and kissed me, which had never happened before. I felt that she was telling me she was "in the pink," and that everything was fine.

But at a few minutes before 11, I was startled awake by the telephone. Bruce frantically shouted at me not to go near lower Manhattan. I thought he was going to say there was a big delay on the subways. Instead he said, "The United States is at war! The World Trade Center is down!"

I couldn't even take that in. "What do you mean the World Trade Center is down? How can it be down?"

After I hung up the phone I put on the radio and heard the whole horror story. It was mind boggling. Because the Twin Towers had the major TV antenna atop one of them, we could only get reception on one channel. Over and over I watched the airplanes crash into the towers and the towers bend over like limp spaghetti and collapse in flames. Outside, it was preternaturally beautiful, clear blue skies (except in the direction of Manhattan where smoke and haze hung over the horizon), sunshine, gorgeous September warmth. There was an eerie stillness because all air traffic had been halted. At first, they thought there was another plane missing. Or maybe it was Flight 93, and later they found the site where those brave souls took their plane down.

I listened to the radio until it was time to meet Jason at the train station, as we had arranged. Kids from the local high school were standing around joking as if it were an ordinary day. I wondered if they had been told or had any idea of what was going on. If they did, how could they stand there and joke?

When Jason arrived, he clearly knew the score. "The trains aren't running," he told me.

"They're not running into or out of Manhattan. But they are traveling in Brooklyn."

He told me that they'd notified the students. In fact, earlier in the day I called the school and asked if they were sending students home. The middle school office told me that they were trying to keep the day as normal as possible for the kids but that parents were welcome to pick them up. I'd decided not to alarm Jason further by picking him up. I knew Bruce was safe, though I didn't know how he was going to get home from Long Island City, since his usual route was through Manhattan.

It was primary day. I forget if I'd already voted, but in any case the primary was rescheduled for September 25th.

The shock and anger stayed with me, probably with most New Yorkers, for a long time. We fortunately did not know anyone who died in the attack, so I found myself mourning the buildings even though I knew the loss of life was far more important. Maybe I just couldn't take it in.

I still feel we should hunt down Bin Laden and his cronies. It won't make the world safe, but at least those particular bottom feeders won't be able to harm innocent people again. We belonged to the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture at the time, and I was disgusted by the way many people there turned the anger inward, and directed it at the U.S. and its policies, as if we somehow deserved this. We almost left membership at that time, and in retrospect, maybe that would have been a good thing.

In any case, while life goes on, I do think the scars remain for me and for many of us. What I really want to see them build in the footprint would be a new set of Twin Towers, identical to the first, but fortified so that no airplane attack could bring them down. That would give the terrorists the finger..in fact two of them.

Chosen Forever

2008-09-11T20:25:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I finished reading Chosen Forever by Susan Richards. It's her sequel to Chosen by a Horse which I haven't yet read, but sounds like a lovely and touching memoir. In Chosen by a Horse she wrote about Lay Me Down, an abused horse she adopted, and then fell in love with. Her relationship with this sweet mare went a long way towards healing her emotional wounds from a childhood of being ignored and unwanted.

In Chosen Forever Ms. Richards describes her experiences after her first book is published, when she goes on a book tour that tries her courage and brings her back into contact with old friends and family. She's also "chosen" once again by a confident older man who knows what he wants the moment he sees her. Ironically, she lives in a house he once owned, and she remembered him as being arrogant at the closing.

But she realizes that what looked like arrogance is confidence and belief in himself, two attributes she very much lacks throughout most of this memoir. Towards the end, though, she begins to relax and not be so frightened of reading before an audience, or worse yet, reading to an empty room.

And the man who has chosen her finally wins her over, and at last, she marries him. It's a happy, almost a Cinderella ending, and it is all because of Lay Me Down, the mare who chose Ms. Richards. One serendipitous event leads to another, and finally, leads to happiness.

One anecdote that stands out in the story is the episode where Ms. Richards is suddenly visited by six men, when ordinarily she hardly ever has visitors. They comment about the horses being in danger on the ice of her pond, and just after they say this, a horse she is boarding walks out onto the ice and falls through. Then the men rush out onto the ice and rescue the horse, saving her life.

The message she got from this was that she would receive what she needed when she needed it, and that people would be there for her. This was an important message that went to the core of her insecurities.

It's a good book, though at times I felt she was whining a bit about her tough childhood and her anxiety level when she had to read her work aloud. Now I'd like to read Chosen by a Horse and see if it measures up.

Sub-Prime Sublime

2008-09-10T19:21:00.000-07:00

This year, Circus Amok brought us the tale of "Sub-Prime Sublime," which began with poor little Dorothy clicking her sneakered heels together and reciting, "There's no place like home," over and over, but she couldn't seem to make the magic work. Glinda explained to her that she has no home, and Dorothy wailed aloud as Glinda told her that her landlord's house was foreclosed, and therefore, Dorothy the renter was out in the cold too.

The Liberty Sisters, Sibyl Liberty, Statue of Liberty and Liberty Belle, invited Dorothy to join them on a quest for a particle accelerator. Various adventures ensued: rich snooty women jumped up in the audience demanding a huge glass tower to live in. Flying zebras danced around the stage, and Harry Potter crossed the Alps on a high wire. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ran for the hills, and we heard a lecture on the history of racist credit exploitation. Dorothy and her friend tried to rob a bank, and a crazy Keystone Kops scene ensued.

There was no yellow brick road, but there was a particle accelerator at the end of the journey, and the spirit of Buckminster Fuller assured us that we would change from manufacturing weaponry to manufacturing livingry (his actual words in some of his writing), and all would be set right.

Circus Amok is always a gas. This was the second year we've seen them. They performed beside Astroland, which was enjoying its very last day before the greedy developers were to shut it down. Pretty ironic.

Last month when I was working at Neighborhood Housing Services I told some of the staff about Circus Amok and suggested they catch this year's show since it is so relevant to their work. I hope someone will. Who knows, they may even invite some of the performers to one of their events!

"Pit Bull in Lipstick"

2008-09-05T20:42:00.000-07:00

Now, there's a gorgeous image of Sarah Palin, McCain's pick for his running mate, all right. I can only hope he's succeeded in shooting himself in the foot. Now, if he'd chosen Condi as his running mate, I'd be worried. But this woman is so huge a mistake that the word should be tattooed in inch-high letters across her forehead. The delegates may have been smiling - some of them - but they are far to the right of most Republicans, let alone the rest of us.

There are so many things wrong with this candidacy, it's hard to list them all. What's the big deal about being a hockey Mom? That and a cup of hot cocoa will qualify her to be a VP. If she's qualified, maybe I am too:

1. I stayed home with my son for 14 years and didn't run around seeking office. Where are the "family values" here?

2. My 19-year-old son hasn't impregnated any underage girls, and he's not about to enter a marriage that has a snowball's chance in hell of success. Note, I said "hell," not "Alaska." Apparently Gov. Palin didn't impart those "family values" to her kid very well. And guess what, teaching "abstinence only" sure didn't work. I think we should send that kid a case of condoms.

3. She's under investigation for some interesting and corrupt activities as governor.

4. Her views are to the right of Attila the Hun, but she's been chosen to try and woo the Hillary Clinton supporters away from the Democratic Party. How cynical. McCain must think women have no sense at all, and will vote for a woman, any woman, even a woman who opposes everything Hillary stands for, just to see a female in high office. In short, he thinks we are idiots. I pray we prove him abysmally wrong.

And isn't it just special to hear the Republicans scrambling to blow off the embarrassing matter of Bristol Palin's underage pregnancy, by saying it's a family matter? What total hypocrites. Just suppose Obama's daughters were a little older and one of them turned up pregnant. If a major network already called Michelle his "baby mama" instead of his wife, just imagine what they'd be saying if one of his kids was underage, unwed, and pregnant.

No, it is not just a family matter when the 17 year old daughter of a VP nominee becomes pregnant and then is (surely) elbowed into a shotgun wedding with her 18 year old "baby daddy." Not when the grandma-to-be is rabidly anti-abortion, pro-creationism, and thinks the war in Iraq is somehow ordained by God. And, not when other teenagers in less auspicious circumstances might point to her and to Miss Spears as role models. (If they can have a baby at 16 or 17, why can't I?)

And, let's not forget that this tidbit was only revealed because bloggers were speculating that Gov. Palin's 5th child was actually 17-year-old Bristol's out of wedlock child. Otherwise, I'll bet the grand old Republicans would have deep-sixed that information.

Now just let them talk about Obama's lack of experience. At least he's in Congress dealing with federal issues. Palin's been mayor of a town of 6,000 people. I've seen more people sitting on the lawn in Central Park just to hear the Philharmonic. And she's been governor of a state with less than 700,000 people...and some disturbing stuff about her behavior in office is coming out. McCain sure hasn't shown presidential-level judgment with his pick. Contrast that with Obama, who picked a VP with the foreign policy knowledge he's said to lack.

Voters should see through this cynical ploy to divert women away from the Democrats, and kick McCain and Palin's hindquarters straight to the nearest curb.

The Joys of Love

2008-08-31T15:48:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed reading Madeleine L'Engle's The Joys of Love as an interesting first novel and period piece. Written in the 1940's when Ms. L'Engle was in her twenties, it describes a young woman whose passion has always been the theater. Now she's on a scholarship, spending the summer as an apprentice to a theater troupe, and her life is about to change.

Liz is in love with Kurt, the wealthy young director, and he pays some attention to her but is maddeningly attentive to other women too. Her friend Ben is clearly in love with her but she doesn't perceive it, is barely aware of him as a man even though she can tell him anything and she greatly values his friendship. She's got a best friend among the apprentices, Jane, and there are various other characters, the obnoxious Dottie, the lazy Bibi, and so on. In the background is Liz's aunt, who disapproves of the theater and is grudgingly providing the $20 a week for Liz's room and board, which is not covered by the scholarship.

The writing, to be expected from a woman who later won a Newbery medal for children's literature, is excellent, but the story seemed quite a bit dated to me, and also not so different from several other stories written at much the same time. I'm thinking of Marjorie Morningstar, the overly long saga of a young woman who believes she's destined to be an actress, but in fact will go on to live an ordinary life, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, where Francie falls madly in love with a man who hid the fact of his marriage in order to seek solace from a woman on his last leave before shipping out to the war, and later falls back upon a young man who is much better for her.

Warning: Spoiler

Similarly, in The Joys of Love, Liz's bubbly crush on Kurt bursts when he lures her to his room and tries to seduce her. She realizes she's being used, and flees. It's Ben who emerges as the suitable and loyal lover. This seemed to be a common "coming of age" theme in the forties. The man who wants sex is the bad guy, and the one who is waiting in the wings, loyal even though he's been overlooked, is the true Mr. Right.

While I felt this was a cliched ending, I did appreciate the writing and the characterizations. It was fascinating to read a book by the young Ms. L'Engle before she really won her writing spurs.

Only a Theory

2008-08-31T15:23:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I finished reading Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, by Kenneth R. Miller. With my background in anthropology, the story of human evolution has always fascinated me. In fact, I'd read so many books on it as a child that I already knew the first half of my physical anthropology course in college.

Professor Miller leads us through a thorough, scientific debunking of the "intelligent design" scam. I won't give it the honor of calling it a theory. He demonstrates in a number of ways that evolution is the best explanation for the way life and its systems have developed.

The Intelligent Designers (ID as he calls it) claim that there are structures within the cell that are of irreducible complexity, and couldn't have developed step by step. But he shows that in fact, they may have other uses when they are not fully complete. Also: the process of blood clotting, thought by the ID devotees to require a precious layout of proteins in order to work properly, something that couldn't develop by evolutionary means, actually could, because there are animals that lack some of these proteins and their blood does in fact clot to close a wound.

Professor Miller also shows that we clearly have kinship with the great apes. Chemically it can be shown that whereas our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, have 48 chromosomes, while humans have only 46, it's clear that a pair of chromosomes somehow became fused with another, reducing the number but not the corresponding genetic material. Further, while many other animals can create Vitamin C within their own bodies, humans have lost this ability and have to eat fruits and vegetables that supply this essential nutrient. So have the great apes.

Professor Miller gives the ID notion serious scientific scrutiny as if it were any other scientific theory, and finds it wanting. Rather than produce hard science to prove their point, the ID'ers simply claim that anything they can't explain is the work of "intelligent design," which boils down to a supernatural creator. Furthermore, their own proponents have admitted that they've not found any scientific proof for the idea of intelligent design.

But that doesn't mean it isn't dangerous. There have still been school boards trying with varying success to force public schools to teach kids an unproven idea, and arguing for "fairness" as if science depended on fairness rather than hard evidence of who is right and who is wrong. What's more, from the writings Professor Miller has uncovered, the underlying aim is not just to bring religious ideas into the public schools on the evolution issue, but to drive a wedge into the whole idea of rational, scientific research, and bring it down, replacing it with an establishment of religion and a "science that serves Christianity."

How long before school kids would be studying that the Sun and planets revolve around the Earth?

This is an excellent book for humanists and traditional religionists alike to read. Professor Miller also addresses the idea of a grand design in the universe, and finds it not incompatible with evolution. He counts himself a Christian but does not confuse religious beliefs with hard scientific facts. More power to him!

Pig Candy

2008-08-24T16:05:00.000-07:00

Pig Candy by Lise Funderburg is a memoir about, "Taking my father south, taking my father home." Somehow just from reading that subtitle, I knew that the father in question was going home to die. I was right. Ms. Funderburg's father George's last years as he slowly succumbs to advanced prostate cancer are the subject of this book. But there's more to it, much more.

It's a book about growing up and being the adult child of a difficult, controlling and demanding father who nonetheless loves his daughters, even though he is highly critical of them. It's a book about being the biracial child of an interracial marriage in America, and about the social codes George grew up under down South. Those codes defined him as "colored" even though he was extremely light-skinned, and defined the way he was treated.

In the tiny town of Monticello, Georgia, George indulges his farmer fancies, buying all sorts of farm equipment, animals and so on. He's donated money for a park to be named after him, and suspects illegal delays in getting it built. His many enthusiasms show him to be a man with a zest for life that's not diminished until a stroke dulls his thinking and flattens his emotions.

The title refers to a special type of pig roast in a "Caja China" that turns the pork and the skin so sweet that it is called "pig candy." This is George's latest enthusiasm as the book opens, and he purchases a Caja China and a large pig with which to celebrate with his family. It represents George's lust for life, even in the face of his terminal illness.

Lise Funderburg brings her father to life again, describes him and the other family members as well as townsfolk they interact with, with a skill that reflects her journalist background. She has a keen sense of place as she conveys the farm and the town of Monticello in great detail. I enjoyed this book and recommend it highly.

Read more about Pig Candy here.

Summer Reading

2008-08-16T14:51:00.001-07:00

I've been lazy and haven't written in 2 weeks. So before I get back into real posting, here's my upcoming reading list:

Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, by Kenneth R. Miller. If I take notes, this might be the basis for a future program with the Brooklyn Humanist Community.

Chosen Forever, a memoir by Susan Richards

Pig Candy, a memoir by Lise Funderburg

The Joys of Love, by Madeleine L'Engle, written in 1941 and published posthumously this year. Ms. L'Engle lit up my childhood with her prize-winning Wrinkle in Time, so I'm curious to read this early work of hers that has been a sort of "lost novel" until now.

I'm in the middle of Stephen King's Lisey's Story, in which one of the central characters has been dead two years, but is a "puffickly Huh-uge" presence. (That's one of his expressions).

Earlier this summer I've read a great deal of historical/paranormal romance (Highlanders from other centuries are apparently the hottest, though the deadest hunks in the known universe), and a number of detective thrillers by James Patterson, John Sandford, and the Kellermans. I also read Peony in Love which was also a sort of paranormal love story by Lisa See. A few months back the BHC Book Club discussed Lisa See's more famous Snowflower and the Secret Fan, so I was curious to read another of her novels. Peony in Love wasn't quite as good but it was still quite interesting, and the theme of women's writing and its importance, as well as disastrous failures to communicate, was the same as in Snowflower.

If anyone's read these books please feel free to comment.

Show Them the Money

2008-08-01T07:34:00.000-07:00

We're in the middle of a frustrating situation. Jason received a gift certificate last year when he graduated high school. Today we tried to use it to order him some items, and the website is not accepting it.

Gift certificates in general are a mistake. A large percentage of recipients forget about them and never cash them in. Therefore, they are a gift to the store, not to the person. So when we know most of them go unused, why do people buy them instead of just handing over a few crisp greenbacks?

Somewhere people got the idea that giving cash is tacky. It's not a good enough gift. It shows you didn't take the time to think about the person receiving the gift and tailor your purchase to his or her particular personality and interests.

So how is a gift certificate any different? It really isn't. Just because a person likes to read, and you buy a certificate to a bookstore, that doesn't show any deep thought either. Let's face it, cash would work just as well. You can give a gift of cash and say, "Here, buy yourself a book you've been itching to read."

I'm never going to buy a gift certificate again. If I don't have the time or energy to pick up a personalized present, then cash will do just fine. It's the right color, it is always the right size, and best of all, it has no expiration date.

The Angel of Union Square

2008-07-28T16:41:00.000-07:00

This morning I attended a 2 hour panel discussion at the Foundation Center, on how to successfully start up a nonprofit organization. Afterwards I went scouting up East 15th Street to look for vanity plates for my other blog, Vain Plates

Union Square was full of produce, cheese, meat, wine, and baked goods stands, for Monday's Greenmarket. I gave a glance but I always end up feeling that everything is just too overpriced. Standing in the midst of all this was a very tall woman dressed as an angel. I have no idea why she was there or what she was supposed to represent. At her feet was a cloth-covered container (for money?) and a large paper rose.

When I got into the subway station I spotted another unusual woman, wearing full makeup but with her head shaved. She wore a "Bald Headed Soprano" tee shirt so I assume she was advertising for a show. Unfortunately I didn't get a photo of her. But that's one thing I enjoy about New York City. You never know what you might see.

Sand Sculpture

2008-07-26T20:15:00.000-07:00

Today we went to Coney Island to see the Sand Sculpture contest. There wasn't really much. Maybe there were 10-15 sculptures in the sand. There were other mounds, unused, that no one claimed.

If you bought a place in the contest you got a tee shirt that said, Coney Island, Summer of Hope. Well, I wonder just what that is about. I know developers are coming in but I hope they won't turn Coney Island into a boring, homogenized bunch of condos and a strip mall. It's run down, it's somewhat tacky, but that is part of it's charm. I'd like to see it stay the same but that's probably a hope that won't be realized.

Bruce says the problem is, for many years people stayed away and didn't give Coney Island the attention it needed. It had become a bit of a no-man's land, and that's probably what attracted the eyes of the developers. Oh yes, they want it to be entertaining, but they'd probably clean it up, do away with the weirdness and freakiness.

I like the weirdness. I want the Mermaid Parade to go on, and Circus Amok to come visit and put on their zany political performances for years and years to come. So that's my hope this summer.

It's All Happening At the Zoo

2008-07-14T15:42:00.000-07:00

We finished up our "staycation" activities on Saturday with a trip to the Bronx Zoo. Here are a few representative photographs. That huge bug is a Madagascar hissing cockroach, which will give you a piece of its mind if you annoy it. When Jason stood close to the docent holding it, the roach jumped onto his shirt. This would have given me a heart attack, but Jason was amused. We are glad it wasn't perturbed with him for tickling one of its cousins and getting it to hiss many years ago at a demo in Prospect Park.

The tiger needs no introduction. It looked fierce and beautiful, everything a big cat should be. The mist up on "Tiger Mountain" was cool and refreshing, too.

I don't know what species of bird that is, but it had a long, snakelike neck when extended. Quite an odd looking little creature. If anyone can identify it, please let me know.

It's hard to get a butterfly to pose. They are forever fluttering their wings. This one obliged long enough for me to snap a photo.

The subway station nearest the Bronx Zoo, East Tremont/West Farms, has a number of stained glass windows illustrating scenes from the Zoo. On the way home, I snapped several photos of them. It's all a part of a memory of a fun day out, even if our feet did get sore traipsing almost the entire length of the zoo and back again.

Staycation

2008-07-11T20:06:00.000-07:00

Since July 4th, Bruce has been on a "staycation." We've done these stay-at-home vacations for years because there hasn't always been the money to go away. All of a sudden it has become trendy to vacation at home, because people can't afford to go away with the high fuel costs.

We did some running around at first, trying to grab all the gusto. After the July 4th party at Tony's (see my other blog, Brooklyn Humanist Community) we went to the Paley Institute of Media, which used to be the Museum of TV and Radio. There was a special on the late George Carlin, including his "seven dirty words" routine. He was hilarious, I was sad when I read he died so young. Nowadays seventy-one is young!

We also treated ourselves to some old TV shows like Get Smart, Seinfeld, and the Twilight Zone. In the library, I watched an Outer Limits episode that starred William Shatner, made back in 1964. Two years before "Star Trek," he played in this episode as a space explorer captain whose project was called "Project Vulcan." I wonder if there was any connection between the script writer and Gene Roddenberry who created "Star Trek" two years later.

Sunday we got a late start and wound up going over to the Brooklyn Historical Society. It was not that exciting this time but I did find some of the Vietnam veterans' stories interesting, and there was an exhibit of antique children's books. Some of them were so moralistic, today's kids probably would chuck them right out the window. For all I know, kids in the 19th century may have wanted to as well. There were stories about dreadful fates that befell children who disobeyed, sucked their thumbs, or committed various other heinous sins. You have to hope that impressionable little minds did not have to listen to these as bedtime stories; they are made-to-order nightmares.

But along with the cautionary tales there were some cute alphabet books and easy reading classics, such as "The Swiss Family Robinson" in words of one syllable.

Monday we met Cynthia for lunch and went to the Malibu diner, and afterwards Bruce and I visited the Museum of Sex. I had to see it at least once since it's such an unusual subject for a museum. I found it all very interesting but none of it particularly stimulating. What I came away impressed with was the extensive human imagination that has put so many bells and whistles on something that is a natural function. But we have surrounded it with so many fantasies and artifacts that it becomes something else entirely.

Tuesday we went on a walking tour of Greenwich Village. It was a Big Onion tour, led by a young man who just earned his Ph.D. in history, with a specialty in the history of New York City. So he was able to give us an in-depth talk on the history of Greenwich Village and why the area is so different from the rest of New York City. Community activism, whether by landowners or by civil libertarians and civil rights activists, has shaped the Village, even to the peculiar layout of the streets and the survival of older style buildings that have vanished in most of the rest of the city.

On Wednesday we went into Hoboken, the birthplace of Frank Sinatra, and took ourselves on part of a self-guided walking tour of the town. I got tired about a third of the way into it; there was too much zig zagging back and forth. So we headed over to their historical society before going home. It turned out to be a very tiny museum and only one of the two galleries was open. We saw a history of Hoboken in postcards. I enjoyed reading the little scribbles people wrote on them, little one liners like, "We'll meet you on Wednesday." Before telephones were popular, that's how people sent their "text messages." It's hard to imagine having to wait a few days to hear from someone about a simple meeting.

The docent was very friendly. We were the only visitors to the museum so we had his full attention. We chatted about Frank Sinatra, and about the museums in New York. Bruce invited him to see the Brooklyn Museum, which he'd never visited before.

After that we took a very long walk back to the Path station, and narrowly escaped the pouring rain.

Yesterday, we had to buy a printer because our old one insists on printing on a slant, and we went to the Bowery today and bought new living room lamps. We've had terrible luck with lamps and I hope these will finally turn out to be the ones that will last us for many years. Oddly, before this, the best lamps we had were a pair of used lamps we bought at a yard sale for $15 for the set. Too bad we didn't find a deal like that again.

Tomorrow it's off to the Bronx Zoo if the weather is right, and Sunday we'll probably take it easy. After that Bruce goes back to work on Monday, and our "staycation" will be over.

The Great Debaters

2008-07-06T17:46:00.000-07:00

Friday morning before the July 4th party, we watched "The Great Debaters." This movie was based on a true story of a professor at Wiley College in Texas, back in 1935, who inspired his students to form a debating team that wound up taking on Harvard. Because these young people were African-American, this was big news, and the debate made history.

Denzel Washington played the starring role and directed the film. He came across as an intensely dedicated man, determined to lift his students (and the sharecroppers in the town) out of their second-class citizenship. He assembles a team of four, but one young man quits the team because the professor will not answer him as to whether he is a Communist. The three remaining students go on to rack up victory after victory, but the professor's other agenda, union organizing, lands him in jail. By the time the summons to face off with the Harvard debating team comes, he is forced to let his students go on alone, in order not to be imprisoned for jumping bail.

There's a romance between a young brilliant and angry ne'er-do-well and the only female student on the team, while the youngest member, a fourteen-year-old boy who is most profoundly affected by the discrimination and cruelty of the Jim Crow south, breaks out of his shyness to become one of the best debaters of all.

This was a real feel-good, inspiring movie that made me want to give a standing ovation. For those wishing to inspire present day students to hone their debating skills and make the most of their education, visit GreatDebaters.org for more information.

Summer Jobs for Teens

2008-07-03T08:12:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reported that summer jobs for teenagers this year are fewer and farther between than they have been in 50 years. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/business/25teen.html?_r=1&ref=jobs&oref=slogin

Overall, only 1/3 of all teenagers between 16 and 19 years old will find summer jobs this year. That's pretty poor. I know Anthony Weiner is working on getting more federal funding for youth employment programs, but is that going to come through quickly enough to save us from a long, hot summer?

With 2/3 of the kids on the streets, idled, we are at risk for the kinds of trouble kids get into when the weather is unbearably hot and sticky, there's no money in their pockets, and nothing productive to do.

What's the alternative? Well, in New York City, at least there are volunteer opportunities, and plenty of free events. Jason will be taking classes in job hunting and office skills at Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow. He'll also take a math class at his college to prepare for yet one more entrance exam (and here I thought he was exempt from those).

Kids in need of volunteer work (which, by the way, can lead to paid job opportunities once you show them what you can do) can find opportunites at Volunteer Match or at Idealist. The public libraries have programs almost every day, and there are free museums, free book readings, concerts, and lectures. So kids don't have to be out on the street looking for mischief, at least not if they make an effort to find something productive to do.

Still, it's hard on the self-esteem, and reduces opportunities to put paid summer jobs on kids' resumes. The economy is in a mess, true, but there's got to be a way to get kids working.

Incident on the Platform

2008-07-02T14:55:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, after volunteering at HMI in the morning and enjoying a lunch of nachos with Cynthia, I arrived on the subway platform at Union Square to witness a disturbing incident. A young man, probably around 30, went into convulsions at the very edge of the platform. He fell over, whacking his head hard against the concrete, and would have rolled onto the tracks if other passengers hadn't grabbed him and pulled him to safety. (He still was not all that far from the edge, though).

Apparently he cut himself when he fell because he was bleeding from somewhere on his head. A few people went upstairs in search of help and came down saying help was on the way. But I didn't see anything. I went upstairs, called 911, and reported the incident to EMS, in hopes they would send an ambulance. I came back to the platform to find one man with a police badge and a walkie talkie hovering over the unconscious man, speaking into it. Then another man in a sort of Transit Authority vest came over and they prevented him from rolling onto the tracks as he tried to turn over (but still not moving him more than a foot or two from the edge).

Meanwhile, probably about 15 minutes had passed and I didn't see any evidence of an amublance. Two more policemen came down, looked the man over, but didn't really do much of anything.

I had to wonder what this unfortunate fellow's chances of survival would have been if he had been dying. Probably not much better than the proverbial snowball in hell. As it was, he might have a concussion or some kind of bleeding on the brain, and precious moments were being lost.

Finally I boarded the train and went home. It's discouraging and disheartening to see how slow the response to this incident was, given that we were only a few minutes away from several hospitals. Someone should have been down there actually doing something for this guy a lot quicker. All I can say is, don't get sick on the subway, darlin'. You may not survive.

A Weekend to Remember

2008-07-01T19:47:00.000-07:00

Last weekend was one of those memorable ones. Friday night we went to the Cyclones game in Coney Island. I'd never been to a professional baseball game before and had all kinds of reservations about it since I was never a sports lover. But because this was a minor league game, it was much more "user friendly" and entertaining. Sammy the Seagull did his thing as the official mascot, and there were some entertainments for the little kids (human bowling balls, etc.) in between innings. Also, the stadium was small so we could see what was happening.

It was one of those good, tense games where the Cyclones were behind at first, then pulled into a tie with the Ironbirds, and finally made the winning score at the very end of the 9th inning! Right after that the Coney Island fireworks went off, and we had a perfect view of them from the stadium.

The BHC turned out in force, with 22 in attendance including some family and friends.

Saturday I brought Bruce along to be my "caddy" while I shopped for bargains at the Salvation Army. I actually found 2 summer weight skirts and 3 pairs of summer weight pants, all for $25.95 (tax included). That's the sort of shopping that makes me smile.

Sunday afternoon Jason and I went to the BHC Book Club where we discussed Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven. In certain ways the book reminded me of the old Jimmy Stewart movie, "It's a Wonderful Life." But there the main character was alive. I felt sad that in this book, Eddie had to die before he got a chance to see his life in perspective and realize that although he felt his life was wasted in a dead-end dreary job as a maintenance man at an amusement park, in fact he'd saved the lives of many, many children, and his life had meaning after all.

That's great, but why couldn't he have learned this before he died?

Still, the discussion was excellent and so was the exercise Sheila had us do, where we designed our own idea of Heaven and then put down the names of 10 people we wanted to meet there. For a little while, Heaven was an apartment in Sheepshead Bay.

I'm excited about the upcoming July 4th potluck BBQ. And next week, Bruce will be off from work and we will have a New York City Staycation, the sort of vacation we've had for years in an attempt to be frugal, but is now all the rage because gas prices have skyrocketed so high. I'm making a list of places I've either never seen or haven't seen in ages, to check out while Bruce is home.

Alas, Poor Ayveq

2008-06-27T14:14:00.000-07:00

I opened the Bay News today and found a sad eulogy to the "star walrus" of the New York Aquarium, Ayveq.

Just a few days after his offspring celebrated his first birthday weekend, Daddy Ayveq succumbed to some mysterious ailment. Here is a link to the article: http://nyaquarium.com/287230/aq_ayveq

During his years as a Docent at the New York Aquarium, Jason often mentioned Ayveq in less than flattering terms. It seems Ayveq had lustful propensities and did not bother to conceal them. Apparently, he was unconcerned about offending public sensibilities. Jason also complained of Ayveq's ungentlemanly attentions to the females in the tank. To top it all off, if Ayveq spotted a Docent in his or her dark green uniform shirt, he would swim after the Docent as far as his tank would allow him.

Jason complained of this to our friend Tony, who found it so humorous that he dubbed Ayveq "Iggy," and teased Jason about Ayveq just about every time they spoke to each other. Jason began calling Tony the "Igman" while Tony dubbed Jason the "Igster."

Jason was not the only one to notice Ayveq's habits, and "Going Coastal" did an article on Ayveq on that very subject, not long after "little" 115-lb. Akituusaq was born. Here's the link to that article, titled "Walrus Dad Still a Self-Lover."

http://goingcoastal.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/walrus-dad-still-a-self-lover/

When Baby Akituusaq was born last June, I pointed out that despite Ayveq being a lewd, crude, rude dude (at least in Jason's eyes), his quite natural behavior had paid off. Ayveq became the father of the first baby walrus born at the New York Aquarium, and one of the few baby walruses to survive in captivity.

Ayveq was a great public attraction and he seemed to know it. I'm sure if he could speak, he would have proudly proclaimed, "I am THE walrus!" In fact, that's exactly what his name meant.

Kudos to the Aquarium staffers who worked hard to try to save Ayveq in his final illness. I'm sure he would have thanked them from the bottom of his heart.

In Memory: Joyce Warshow

2008-06-25T18:10:00.000-07:00

I'm including a link to a write up about Joyce Warshow that appeared last fall, shortly after she died. http://jwa.org/discover/weremember/warshow/, and I will be linking this webpage to their memorial page.

Joyce Warshow was my therapist from 1980 to 1983, when I was just getting out on my own as a young single woman. I went to her for a consultation because my relationships with men had fallen into an unfortunate pattern.

Although Joyce was only supposed to meet with me the one time and then refer me to another therapist in her group, she managed to get past some of my defenses and rattle me in that very first meeting. The other therapists I'd met with did not. So after a few days I called her back and firmly stated that I did not want to be referred on to someone else, I wanted to work with her. Joyce made room for me in her schedule, and so we began.

Many times we did not see eye to eye. I told her I was against the establishment, and she pointed to my corporate attire and told me I had joined the establishment. I didn't want to hear that. Another time, speaking about the difficulties I had with men, she told me that some men are like wild horses and need to be corralled. I replied that I didn't want to have to "corrall" a man. I wanted him to want to be committed to me.

But I was getting out the residual angers from my childhood, and learning to grow up and be my own person. I was ruled by myself and not so influenced by my parents any more. For a year or more I participated in group therapy also, but then I felt it became too expensive and I pulled away.

When I finally left we had an exit interview, and at the end of our last session, Joyce hugged me and I went out, ready to face life on my own terms. Yes, I had one more stupid relationship with a man whose major attraction was his anti-establishment attitude and his beard. That was my old pattern. But when that broke up I saw it for what it was, a hangover from an earlier time. And when Bruce came along, the "nice guy" I would have ignored a decade earlier, I was more than ready for him.

I called Joyce about 9 years ago, when I was grieving for a friend and yet not able to dissolve that grief into healing tears. I felt I couldn't afford her prices, but it was good to connect with her however briefly. The last thing she said to me was that I had always been resourceful.

At Fund Raising Day in New York I found out that Joyce passed away last year. This was one of those non-coincidences. At a workshop on branding, the presenter mentioned a coalition of GLBT organizations with reproductive rights organizations, working together for common goals. I was puzzled to note that HMI was not represented on the list and afterwards I went up to the presenter and asked her if she knew why HMI was not part of the coalition. For some reason she mentioned that Joyce Warshow used to be involved there, and when I said she used to be my therapist, the presenter told me that Joyce had died. It was so strange to hear that in the middle of a professional conference, by supposedly sheer accident. Only I don't believe in accidents.

I believe Joyce was sending me a last goodbye.

When she was my therapist, I had no idea she was a lesbian, a filmmaker, and deeply involved in the GLBT community. In fact, I think it was SAGE she was involved with and maybe not HMI, but that doesn't matter. Would it have mattered to me if I'd known this when she was my therapist? Back then, I might have wondered how she could teach me how to get along with men, if she was in a relationship with a woman. But now I know better. I know she was really teaching me, first and foremost, to get along with myself.

Now I'm curious to see some of the films she made, and I'm going to investigate and see whether they can be rented somewhere. In any case, cancer took her too soon, at only 70 years old. Farewell, Joyce, you have clearly touched many many lives. Mine is just one of them.

Town Hall With Anthony Weiner

2008-06-24T13:47:00.001-07:00

On Sunday we went to a Town Hall meeting with our Congressman, Anthony Weiner. We all sat in the library at Cunningham Intermediate School, and the Congressman fielded questions from the participants (about 35-40 of us).

He led into the meeting by stating that today there is more information, less compromise, and zero leadership at the top of our government.

He wants to make sure we have an educated workforce, and that we invest in our infrastructure and put people to work. We have ignored our infrastructure for so many years that it is suprising that in the whole U.S. only one bridge has collapsed. Our best tool is education, and it is time to get rid of the antiquated idea that the federal government should not be involved in public education. As a result of this thinking only 6% of our educational monies come from the federal government. But the states are no longer competing with each other; the U.S. is competing globally.

Congressman Weiner also stated that we need leadership on global climate change. We need to leave our world, country and community better than we found it. He wants to see us move toward a green economy.

We must end the war in Iraq and address the big challenges that we have not been able to look at because we are wasting our resources in Iraq. We also need our elected officials to think in the long term even though their term of office is short. The government must incentivize people to think long term, according to Weiner, and we must invest in education over the course of a generation.

I'm proud to say that our Congressman has a perfect 100% score on conservation issues. He says that our community is now overdeveloped. The zoning laws, last changed in 1961, are outdated, and the Board of Standards and Appeals doesn't set standards and doesn't listen to appeals. We need to grow as a city but we have to be sustainable too. He has proposed a full city reassessment of the zoning regulations, so we can decide what kind of a city we want to be. We need to set rules and then stick to those rules. Legal sanctions for violating zoning regulations are strong but they are not being enforced.

Congressman Weiner also discussed accessibility for the handicapped. Another question was whether any more affordable housing complexes will be build. He said, the Fed has stopped building subsidized housing but they need to do it again. However when the Mitchell-Lama buildings were built there was land available. He says now there is some polluted land that the city would clean if developers will build affordable housing. We need to be creative about bringing in affordable housing, perhaps develop air rights over other structures if the resulting units would be affordable. We have to stop thinking this is not the federal government's job.

We have to make alternative transportation possible: there is no more room for more cars in New York City. We have to make it possible by providing bike lockers and bike borrowing as in other places.

Our current model of using fossil fuels is not sustainable. The Congressman wants to offer incentives in the market for sustainable energy that works. Ethanol, he says, is a disaster because it drives up food prices and costs more to produce than the energy we get out of it. A national energy policy is needed.

The Congressman also stated that he is not pleased with the 311 "hotline" to NYC government agencies, because it creates a whole new layer of excuses between citizens and their government.

At the end of his talk he asked us to get in touch with his office (through his website) if we have an idea for a new law. I certainly will!

Mermaid Parade 2008

2008-06-22T18:21:00.000-07:00

It glitters. It spangles. It dazzles the eyes and ears. It's funny, it's naughty, it's socially relevant, and it's phantasmagoric. It's Halloween and the Mardi Gras in June.

It's the Mermaid Parade!

The 26th Annual Mermaid Parade stepped off on the first full day of summer, June 21st. Bruce, Jason and I were there by 12:30 and found a spot on the barricades by a few minutes after 1. We met up with Ferdinand and wriggled into the bit of space beside him.

Ferdinand felt the parade would not start until at least 2:30, but I said it would begin earlier. We made a gentleman's bet. Said Ferdinand, "You have nothing to lose but your dignity."

"No problem," I answered, "I haven't any!"

So, Ferdinand suggested we go for double or nothing. He lost the bet; the first floats and antique cars crossed in front of us at about 2:17. Close to the front of the parade, our Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz was celebrating, too. Marty is a true party animal; he never misses a parade! Now he was shouting, "Hello all you Brooklyn meshuggeners! Don't worry, the half-naked people are right behind me!"

There must have been a good thousand marchers. Some that stand out in my mind were the protestors, trying to save Coney Island from being turned into Yuppie Island, paved over with luxury condos and complete with overpriced lattes at Starbucks. The possible encroachment of Thor developers may have explained the contingent of Marie Antoinette's (male and female) and the huge fake guillotine. Let 'em eat cake!

Another protestor wore a pot for a hat and had huge golden dollar signs on her glasses. Greed personified. But as usual, most of the marchers had at least some passing resemblance to sea creatures, real and fanciful.

There were hundreds of mermaids, many of them scantily clad in bikini tops. Others went even farther and heeded the advice on the windshield of an antique convertible, "Go Topless." Women wore seashell pasties, or substituted body paint for clothing. Many of the men were topless and a few were showing off their rear cleavage as well.

I picked up on a bit of a Hawaiian theme, with many marchers in grass skirts and wielding hula hoops. There was a group dressed as Carmen Miranda, with baskets of fruit (and fish) on their headgear. We saw King Kong and the Mermaid, French Mermaids with seashells and sea stars on their black and white uniforms, plenty of sea jellies, lobsters and octopi.

The Polar Bears, those characters who jump into the ocean on January 1st each year, were there, as were some deep sea divers whose slogan is "Wetter is Better." Brooklyn for Peace was represented, as was the Cyclones, and many other groups, including the Mermaids' Civil Liberties Union!

Some of the zaniest folk from last year made a re-appearance: the Parrot Man, who wears a sequined and spangled dress, dyes his beard light green, and carries his gray parrot on his head. Then there's the bearded man who wears a bridal gown of salvaged items and called himself Miss Use of Recycled Materials 2008. Every year there's a new official King Neptune and his wife Queen Mermaid, but there were also plenty of imitators in the parade. Penis Man, the dude who dresses in a pine-colored velvet suit equipped with a phallus big enough to do the Jolly Green Giant proud, was back, too. He came up to us and whacked Ferdinand and me over the head a number of times with his absurdly oversized "member." Afterwards, Ferdinand said, "I don't know about you, but I feel violated!"

Ferdinand brought his new DSLR and we both snapped photos like mad while several men behind us yelled out suggestive and lewd remarks at every bare-breasted woman who marched by. By the end of the parade, I found that I'd taken over 1,000 photos. I had a little trouble zooming in and zooming out, and consequently had to delete quite a few photos of armpits. But with ruthless, and I do mean ruthless, cutting, I narrowed it down to 372 pictures. Now I'm thinking about trying to sell some of them.

Every year, the Mermaid Parade outdoes itself. I'm still hearing "Dancing Queen" in my mind, and seeing the whole cheerfully outrageous crew cavorting by. Let's keep Coney Island weird!

City Sights

2008-06-17T13:23:00.000-07:00

Or should I say sightings? In the past week or so, I've seen:

A man with dreadlocks that fell past his backside and brushed his upper thighs. I'll bet he's a law abiding citizen, because if not, it would be awfully easy to grab him by the long hairs.

A man with his pet cat perched on his head. This turned out to be a panhandling ploy, because as soon as I smiled at the cat, its owner approached me for a handout.

A buxom young woman with a hideous stuffed toy nestled between her breasts. You have to wonder why.

And, yesterday, while enjoying Thai food for lunch, a man carrying a skeleton passed by the restaurant. I believe the skeleton was plastic but I'm not entirely sure.

That's what I love about New York. You never know just what to expect!

Fund Raising Day in New York

2008-06-15T09:43:00.000-07:00

This year, like last June, I attended the Fund Raising Day in New York conference at the Marriott Marquis hotel. Like last year, I volunteered at the conference, which enabled me to attend for free. Thursday night I attended the volunteer orientation and cocktail party, and on Friday morning I arrived at the conference a few minutes after 7:30 AM.

Over a tasty continental breakfast, I chatted with a young man who'd come down from Toronto to attend the conference. He told me that he works as a consultant, writing grants and creating videos for nonprofit organizations.

I wasn't on duty until the second lecture, so I walked through the exhibit hall for a while, evoking nervous jokes from men who read my "Room Monitor" volunteer's ribbon. I assured them I would not report them to the principal! Then I was free to attend the first lecture of my choice, so I went to a panel discussion on major gifts.

After that there was some time to check out the exhibit hall, score some candy, and get literature from the exhibitors. The first workshop was so well attended that hotel employees had to come take down the air walls, so that the overflow crowd could sit in the hall. The topic was "Connecting with Your Donors," and the two speakers were Thaler Pekar of Thaler Pekar and Associates, and Barbara Becker of StoryCorps. They both spoke about the importance of finding stories that evoke vivid images in donor's minds, and touching their hearts as they view and hear from people whose lives are improved by the organization.

I counted at least 70 attendees at this workshop. It was hard to tell how many people were sitting out in the hall, but one thing was clear: this was a topic many fundraisers were anxious to hear about.

There was a short break before lunchtime, but I had a phone call from Jason. He wanted to go on a sleepover but had very little money left, so I arranged for him to meet me at the conference at 3:30 and then proceeded to lunch.

Lunch was elegant, a small salad, mozzarella slices and tomato, and tuna. There were tiny confections for dessert, iced tea, and coffee. However, this year I preferred to return to the exhibit hall and chat with the exhibitors while the hall was relatively quiet. So I missed the keynote speech.

One of the printing companies had a handwriting expert on hand to amuse the attendees, and I had a somewhat rushed session with her because I had to get back to my post for the 2 PM workshop. She was right on the money about me, telling me I am unconventional and don't much care what people think, I know I can do the job. She said I am creative also and that I put my creativity into an organization. There was also something she said that was a bit eerie, because she told me I had a negative experience at a certain age, and she was absolutely right. She said it was a "shot in the dark" but I don't believe in coincidences. She certainly brings a high level of intuition to her handwriting analysis.

The second workshop I worked at was on the topic of Branding, and it was run by a woman named Bonnie McEwan from Make Waves Not Noise. Ms. McEwan gave us a few eye-opening facts about nonprofit organizations. For instance, last year over 64,000 new organizations registered as nonprofits. They're all competing for the same donor dollars, and competition is not conducive to social change.

She also pointed out some of the specific challenges that nonprofits face in branding themselves, and suggested that one way to avoid competition is for nonprofit organizations with similar goals to form coalitions and collaborate with each other, sharing a common brand and sharing in the monies raised. She quoted John Nash, whose life was the subject of the movie, "A Beautiful Life." His paradigm was, "All players benefit if information is open to all and mixed strategies are used."

Not only do organizations that collaborate in coalition with others gain more resources, they make more progress toward their common goals.

After a half hour break, during which I met Jason and supplied him with some spending money, and went to the raffle drawing where I didn't win any prizes, I attended the last lecture of the day. This time I chose the career track and attended a panel discussion on interviewing. The panelists were a human resources manager and a high-level recruiter. They had some good suggestions on interviewing and dealing with sticky questions.

One woman told some of her "war stories" about terrible interviewers she has met, and afterwards I approached her and told her I wanted to write an article on "Interviews from Hell." She agreed to be interviewed, so I will be writing up and sending out queries for this article.

I enjoyed the day and always gain a new perspective on the fund raising profession by attending this conference. For anyone in the field or considering entering the field, I recommend it highly.

Farewell, Rosanne

2008-06-10T14:12:00.000-07:00

I met Rosanne in July of 1991. We were airing our toddlers at a large playground in Sheepshead Bay. Jason and Louis immediately took to each other and ran off to play together. Rosanne looked at me and grinned.

"They're in cahoots!" she said. Jason and Louis continued to be in cahoots throughout their childhood and adolescence too.

Rosanne and I encountered each other in the playground a number of times. She was uncomfortable going home to her apartment on Quentin Road because there was a mouse problem. So she stayed most of the day in the park, and the family ate out almost every night because it upset her to cook where the mice played.

Not too long after we met, we began meeting by design. When the weather turned cold, we left the playground and began meeting in indoor play spaces like Burger King and MacDonald's. Back then many of the fast food restaurants had little play areas for the children, filled with plastic balls they could climb around in, slides, and other attractions. We'd buy Happy Meals for the kids and then sit and chat while they played in the ball pit.

Sometime during that first year, Rosanne and her family moved out to Canarsie to get away from the mice. I was sad, thinking that we might drift apart. Without a car, Canarsie seemed so far away. But at that time Rosanne and Allen had a big brown car and she would come pick me up to go hang out somewhere.

We always had a struggle with the car seats. That is, we had a struggle with getting Louis into his car seat. Jason would get into the car seat calmly but Louis hated them and he would put up such a fight that it would take the both of us to hold him down and snap him into the seat. That may have been one of the first times I heard Rosanne utter one of her signature lines: "Louis Henry, I'm gonna crown you, and it ain't gonna be King!"

My response always was, "But Ro! You named him for two royal houses, naturally he thinks he's in charge!"

In the early years, we celebrated New Year's Eve together. We'd visit them or they would come over to us. We'd have a feast, share some wine, and then eat delicious and sinful desserts. Then there would be a sleepover. We travelled together, too. When the boys were just under 4 years old, we rented an SUV and they drove us out to Lancaster, PA for a weekend. The boys were impossible: overtired and full of mischief, they led us on a merry chase the entire weekend. But we still managed to have fun visiting the Amish country and Hershey Park.

At one point, when the kids all entered school, we had a weekly standing date for Burger King or MacDonald's. Rosanne sometimes brought Louis, and Jason's other two friends, Steven and Morgan, often came too.

Sometime shortly after they moved to Canarsie, Rosanne was approached by some Jehovah's Witnesses who came door to door. She became interested and began going to Bible study with them. I was concerned again when I saw how her views were changing. Suddenly evolution was all wrong, even celebrating birthdays was all wrong. For a few years, she continued to allow Louis to come to Jason's birthday parties but she would send Allen with him in her stead. Then when she was baptized, she no longer allowed him to come at all.

But Rosanne held firm about one thing. She told me that when she joined the Witnesses they wanted her to give up all her "worldly" friends who would lead her astray. "You and me are friends for life," she assured me. And Jason and Louis would be friends for life, too. We joked about watching them graduate college together, about watching them be each other's best men at their weddings.

That wasn't going to happen.

I was the one who got sick first. In 1997 we discovered that I had breast cancer. Rosanne was a huge help. She took care of Jason several times when I went into the hospital for procedures. She helped out again when Bruce had his bout with cancer in 1998.

The kids grew up, and began going out places without adults along. Sometimes Rosanne and I did not see each other for a few months at a time but we always kept in touch and kept up the friendship.

Then, in January 2007, Rosanne wasn't feeling well. She had trouble breathing and tired easily. An X ray or scan showed a large mass in her chest cavity that hadn't been there 4 months earlier when she had a previous X ray. Sadly, the mass turned out to be malignant, a rare form of cancer. I believe it was called myxoid liposarcoma, a type of tumor that grows in the fat cells.

Rosanne was in and out of the hospital many times in the next year and a half. She had her surgery several months later, delaying it somewhat because she was a Witness and wanted to find a doctor who would operate without having to give her whole blood. Her husband feared that while she searched for such a doctor the cancer would spread.

Honestly, I don't think the delay in surgery affected the outcome. This tumor was huge when it was found and probably had already spread to her liver and other places. It was also extremely fast growing. In any case, Rosanne suffered several infections and other problems that delayed her chemotherapy time after time. Each time that happened the tumor had the opportunity to grow, until it overtook her.

The last time I saw her, it was about 36 hours before she died. She was miserably uncomfortable. She wasn't eating and she kept calling out and praying. I don't think she was in terrible pain but she just could not feel relaxed and comfortable. Her labored breathing was very obvious. I knew she didn't have a lot of time. As we left the hospice I prayed that she would be taken quickly and in her sleep. And that's what happened.

She leaves behind a husband of 23 years, an 18 year old son, and many, many friends. I have no doubt that Rosanne will be long remembered. I'll miss her.

Changes Afoot

2008-05-31T20:38:00.000-07:00

I am thinking about changing my blog. I note that there hasn't been much added to it in recent weeks, and posts are about ten days apart. Maybe I need to move things around and recategorize them.

What I'm thinking about doing is splitting things off into more than one blog. Maybe one to chronicle the Brooklyn Humanist Community, which is going strong. Another one might be for the books I read and the movies I view. Then there can be the personal stuff, that might stay in this blog.

Would I keep up with all this? Who knows? I'm just thinking that a more cohesive topic would be a help. If I ever decided to go for some advertising or to try and get publicity for the Brooklyn Humanist Community, it is probably better to keep it all under one heading rather than throw random topics into one big mishmosh of a blog.

So I think what I will do is move some of the existing posts into a new blog and see where it goes from there.

Here goes....

BHC News

2008-05-21T05:24:00.000-07:00

The Brooklyn Humanist Community met again on Sunday, May 18th at the Kensington Library. We had a poetry reading, something that used to be a tradition for those of us who belonged to BSEC in the past. Although several of our readers could not make it, eight people read and it was a great success.

Tomorrow night we'll have our planning meeting. This should be pretty exciting because we need to decide whether we are going to incorporate as a nonprofit, a religious organization, or simply remain a social club with many activities, as we are doing now. I would like to see us move toward being a 501(c)(3) but that is going to depend on the group's decision.

We also need to decide whether to have a guest speaker from out of town. I feel very strongly that Curtis Gans can put us on the map. He's a known expert on the American electoral process and voting habits. The man is well respected on both sides of the political spectrum, and he has spoken all over the place, including before Congress.

So, I feel we can give him some publicity and his presence would be a real gift to us and a chance to make a name for ourselves as a new organization with the ability to attract some high-level speakers. I hope that I can convince the group to be willing to lay out some money (not all that much, even) in order to bring him here.

There's a lot riding on the meeting tomorrow night. I have my fingers crossed that all will turn out in a satisfactory way.

For One More Day

2008-04-24T04:59:00.000-07:00

Mitch Albom's Tuesdays With Morrie was a book that touched me deeply at a time when I was struggling with the loss of my friend and mentor, Richard Price. So when I saw his newer book, For One More Day, I had to read it.

What a stunner. I have read many books about the dead returning to save a loved one in despair, but this one was so immediate, so real, that my eyes were wet. That doesn't happen often when I read a book.

It made me think of my own mother, and it also made me want to hand the book to Jason and tell him, read this before it is too late.

There are chapters headed, Times I Did Not Stand Up for My Mother, juxtaposed against other chapters titled, Times My Mother Stood Up for Me.

Somehow, really, we expect this relationship between mothers and children. Mother gives her all, and the mother in this book, Posey, certainly did. She stood up for her son whenever she perceived a threat to him. On the other hand her son, Chick, didn't stand up for her when he thought it was a contest between his father and his mother, or his mother and the outside world.

Sometimes, though, he did. His parents divorced and so his mother became an outcast, with other women afraid she would charm their husbands away from them. When Chick caught some boys spying on his mother with binoculars and saying, "Look at the divorcee," as if it were a smutty word, he did react and beat them up.

But, he felt he abandoned her to follow his father's dream of making him into a baseball star, and she succumbed to a heart attack. Who hasn't felt he or she wasn't there enough for Mom?

Even though it's in the nature of things, it felt deeply satisfying to see Chick get his one more day with his Mom, and accompany her in the spirit world to minister to people who were about to die. Wonderful story of salvation, because when he awakens, Chick sets about repairing his own broken family, cleaning up his alcoholism, and becoming a part of his daughter's life again, where once he was such an embarrassment that she didn't even invite him to her wedding.

And Mitch Albom dedicates the book to his own mother and reveals that at least one incident in the story came directly from his own life; there's a photograph to prove it.

I guess it is fitting that I read this right before Mother's Day. It is the perfect Mother's Day present... from a mother to a child.

BHC April Program

2008-04-14T19:45:00.000-07:00

"The first days are the hardest days, don't you worry any more
Cause when life looks like easy street, there is danger at your door."

-- The Grateful Dead, "Uncle John's Band"

It's not always simple getting a new organization off the ground, but we've been managing to come up with monthly programs on a variety of issues, and to have plenty of fun too.

Sunday we met at the Kensington Library, where Remi gave a talk on The Truth of Myth. She brought out the psychological needs that are built into our brains and into all societies, a need for a myth or story, as Kurt would put it.

Remi spoke of the disconnect many people have between the mammalian brain, the cerebellum, that rules emotions, and the cerebrum, that gives us the ability to think and be logical. The need for myth arises from the emotional part of the brain, which requires teaching and needs to be helped to grow just as much as the logical part. She mentioned the story of a young boy who had a nervous breakdown, and when his psychiatrist explored the reasons, he realized that the boy grew up in a family of very intelligent, logical thinkers who wanted nothing but scientific facts in their lives. Consequently they never read their son any children's stories, fairy tales, or myths. That side of his development had not kept pace with his high IQ, so he became dysfunctional.

Once this was discovered, the boy began to recover as his therapist read stories to him, and finally he ordered his family to read children's stories to him every night as other families did.

Remi also brought out that the Greek myths were about gods who were not infallible, in fact they were very fallible. Even though they were more powerful than humans they had some very human failings, which helped people to feel that they were not so unreachable. She also pointed out that until a certain age (the onset of adolescence, maybe) children need heroes to help them feel safe and secure. Take away Samson, she said, and he will be replaced by Superman, because children need that super powerful figure to believe in. Later on many people replace the mythical heroes with an abstract figure such as God.

We went around the room and talked about our thoughts on myths and any myths that have been important to us. One person brought up Prometheus, who brought fire to humanity and was punished by being chained to a rock and having an eagle eat his liver every day. I mentioned two children's stories that influenced me a great deal, both Dr. Seuss books: Horton Hears a Who, and Horton Hatches the Egg. Horton Hatches the Egg fits into the BHC ideal of keeping commitments, because Horton the elephant stays on that nest and keeps that baby bird warm no matter what befalls him. Horton Hears a Who demonstrates not only the importance of standing up for the "invisible" and overlooked people in society, no matter how tiny a minority they may be, but also the importance of everyone standing together and speaking out against injustice.

Both these books were an influence on me as a child and I think led me into the ethical path that first induced me to explore and join Ethical Culture, and then when BSEC failed to walk its talk, breaking away and helping to form the Brooklyn Humanist Community.

After a short break, The Sticker Dude recited the "Storyteller" poem, and then sang folk and protest songs, all selected so we could sing along. He took us from Paradise (Kentucky) to the Promised Land. Along the way we sang along to "Uncle John's Band," "This Little Light of Mine," and many others. It was a rollicking, fun way to finish up the program, and brought back some nostalgic thoughts of Sticker Dude's impromptu concerts in the basement of BSEC. But now we're the Brooklyn Humanist Community, and by golly, BHC Rocks!

BHC Book Club: My Sister's Keeper

2008-04-14T19:25:00.001-07:00

On Friday night the BHC Book Discussion Group met at Sheila's apartment to discuss My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult. Sheila provided a delicious dinner: a giant bagel sandwich, cole slaw, potato and macaroni salad, fruit salad, cookies and chocolates.

After we ate the "jury" convened to deliberate on whether the various characters in the Fitzgerald family acted ethically. For the most part, we favored Anna, the main character, who was created as a "designer baby" to be a perfect genetic match and therefore a stem cell donor for her older sister Kate, who had a rare and very dangerous form of leukemia. Most of us criticized the mother, Sara, for her obvious favoritism toward Kate to the exclusion of her two other children, Anna and Jesse. Anna was raised with the expectation that she would always be there to donate blood, bone marrow and even body parts to save her sister. Jesse, the oldest and the only male, has become so embittered by being pushed aside and treated as insignificant that he has resorted to drugs, stealing cars, and arson. The father, Brian, could be viewed as kinder to his youngest child than Sara, or else as passive, letting Sara make all the decisions and not putting in his two cents.

Some people felt that Sara was right to try and save Kate at all costs, even if it meant endangering Anna. Others felt Anna was right to bring a lawsuit for medical emancipation from her parents so that they could not coerce her into giving up a kidney for her sister. The discussion was lively and impassioned, and all sorts of moral criteria came to the fore.

It's a tough book to read, especially with the shocking and tragic ending. But the writing drew me in and I ended up reading it three times.

This was an excellent evening, with lots of input from everyone. Our next book will be A Thousand Splendid Suns.

A BHC Reflection on Freedom

2008-04-06T21:28:00.000-07:00

Last night we gathered at Rozanne and Michael's home in Park Slope for a Reflection. This was one of the best turnouts we've had so far. We had about 23 people. Rozanne made a "few simple things," and since she's an accomplished chef, they were absolutely wonderful. After we feasted Kurt led the reflection, based on this poem:

True Freedom
To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.
To weep is to risk being called sentimental.
To reach out to another is to risk involvement.
To expose feelings is to risk showing your true self.
To place your ideas and your dreams before a crowd
is to risk being called naive.

To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To live is to risk dying.
To hope is to risk despair, and to try is to risk failure.

But risks must be taken, because the greatest risk in life
is to risk nothing.
The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing.
He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn and feel and change and grow and love and live.
Chained by things that are certain, he is a slave.
He has forefeited his freedom.

Only the person who risks is truly free

.....Author Unknown

The discussion was excellent. At the end, we spoke about those we admire..risk takers or not. I said I admired Beth, who heard from her doctor that she shouldn't buy birthday candles..and every year that she survived, she sent the twit a box of birthday candles.

I liked Jason's story. He said that he admired an autistic boy he met at the stable, who hasn't spoken before but has started speaking there. He made everyone chuckle when he mentioned that the boy has recently started speaking to "a female."

It was great to see so many of us together again. Some of our events have been well attended, others not so much. This one was a real crowd. Rozanne's home is a beautiful setting, a large brownstone with antique furnishings. There's a beautiful kimono hanging on the wall behind the piano. You would think it came straight from Japan but it was purchased in Kansas City. They have figurines that look like they came from Mexico or South America, and in the kitchen Rozanne has a collection of serving dishes mounted on the wall, each one different from the others.

The house is lovely, their adopted daughter is a lovely young lady, but it is their graciousness that makes it such an uplifting experience to be in their home. It was a great night, and everyone who attended contributed some unique thoughts. Ruth said something that stays in my mind: when asked about admiring someone who took a risk, she pointed out that as a group we took the risk of leaving BSEC and forming our own organization, and it is working!

Next we have to organize the Seder on the 25th. I'm going to start making calls tomorrow and get the ball rolling. That should be lots of fun! And it will revive a tradition that went by the wayside for so many years. We're going to revive them all! This was a successful and heartwarming event. There will be many more.

Organized Crime in the Third Grade

2008-04-06T20:55:00.000-07:00

I heard on the news that a group of third graders in Georgia didn't appreciate their teacher's scolding. So they banded together and cooked up a plan to tie her up, stab her with a steak knife, cover up the windows, and then clean up the mess.

You have to give them credit for organized planning, but this is a pretty cold and ugly plan to be cooked up by a group of eight and nine-year olds. They must have had the modern "teamwork" approach to education, since they parcelled out the tasks so neatly. These kids could run a junior crime organization; perhaps they'll be hearing from recruiters.

But somewhere along the way, someone forgot to teach them right from wrong.

I don't think this can happen at school. It comes from the parents, and apparently the parents in this case were not up to the job. Or, maybe they were too busy scraping out a living, but that doesn't fly with me. Plenty of people have scraped for a living but remembered to instill some values in their kids.

It's pretty frightening when kids who should be playing at Chucky Cheese or watching cartoons are instead plotting to stab their teacher. What kind of a world are we creating by leaving kids to learn their morals from a TV set or a video game?

"The Other Boleyn Girl"

2008-03-24T05:46:00.000-07:00

On Friday Bruce and I went to see "The Other Boleyn Girl." We don't get to the movies much and I am not an experienced critic, but I very much enjoyed the film. Somewhere along the line I may have read about Mary Boleyn who was also mistress to Henry VIII and bore him a son. However he couldn't acknowledge the child because he was still married to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. In the meantime, while Mary was on bedrest, the more ambitious Ann won him over, supposedly by teasing him and refusing to give herself to him unless they were married.

I doubted that was historically accurate as I suspect breaking with the Catholic Church was Henry's idea and not Ann's. But in any case he broke with the Church and established his own Church of England which permitted divorce, and he sent Catherine home. He married Ann, but according to the film he already disliked her and only wanted her to slake his lust. She miscarried a boy, supposedly, that only Mary and their brother George knew about.

Then, the fatal mistake, Ann decided to try to make a son with her brother, on the premise that at least the baby would resemble her and she could pass it off as Henry's own. Now, when I read up on it, it seemed that the charge of incest was trumped up and used to get rid of her since she too had failed in her purpose as a brood sow to bear the king a male heir. George was executed for a crime history says he did not commit, and Ann was beheaded two days later. Of them all, Mary lived out her life peacefully and happily. And Ann's child, Elizabeth, was Henry's heir after all and ruled England for 45 years.

So really, Ann Boleyn lost her head because of sexism, plain and simple. Henry couldn't imagine that a daughter could rule as queen, instead of a son as king.

In the film, the Boleyn father, Thomas, was portrayed as an ambitious man without principles who was willing to pimp his daughters to get ahead at court. His wife was the one who saw through the whole thing and warned him time and again that he was putting the entire family at risk, for treason was what the king and his advisors made it.

I pitied her, because she had no power to stop what her husband was doing to her children, and she ended up seeing two of them die before her.

The early scenes between Mary and Henry were tender and sensual. It seemed he really cared for her, but he was a spoiled absolute monarch who let his head be turned by the next woman and the next. Probably Mary was lucky that he turned his attentions away from her, and she ended up marrying someone else after her first husband died and living happily with him (though, history says this marriage ruined her fortunes, she was still happy with her husband).

The historical truths, even though of course there was fiction mixed in, made this an interesting film. I love the costumes and pageantry of that era, and the acting was good as well. So I definitely recommend this film, especially to any history buffs out there.

Women Who Changed My Life

2008-03-17T19:34:00.000-07:00

Helen Keller: The first woman outside my family who made an impression on me was Helen Keller. It happened this way: when I was eight, my mother took me to see “State Fair” and “The Miracle Worker” as a double feature at Radio City Music Hall. She thought I would love “State Fair” and find “The Miracle Worker” too heavy. She was mistaken.

Halfway through “State Fair,” when the actors were singing some insipid song about an elephant on a revolving platform, I jumped out of my seat, put my hands on my skinny hips, and said loudly, “This movie is about absolutely nothing!” Then I sat down in a huff and endured the rest of the film in stony silence.

But when “The Miracle Worker” came onscreen, my whole attitude changed. I was fascinated by Helen. It amazed me that even before Anne Sullivan came to educate Helen, she had adapted herself so well to her surroundings. In her autobiography, Helen Keller mentioned her early childhood days and how she figured out how to steal keys and lock people into various rooms. She locked her mother into the pantry and when Anne Sullivan first arrived she locked her into her bedroom too.

Of course, an ordinary child would have been punished but because of her disabilities Helen was left undisciplined until Ms. Sullivan arrived. Helen described the amazing moment of enlightenment at the water pump when she realized that the letters Anne Sullivan spelled into her hand meant water, the cool liquid flowing over her fingers, and how she put it all together, saying her baby word, “Wa-wa,” over and over again.

Because I was such an avid reader, I identified with Helen’s giddy excitement as she rushed about asking Anne Sullivan the name of each object she touched. It reminded me of the rush of excitement I’d felt just 3 years earlier, when I suddenly realized I was able to read without sounding out the words on the page.

After the movie was over, I wanted to know more. I went to the library and checked out every book there was on Helen Keller. Also at that time, JFK was President, and some toy company came out with a doll called “Caroline” that bore some resemblance to Caroline Kennedy. I received this doll as a gift, possibly for my birthday.

But in my eyes, this doll was not the President’s daughter. She also bore a resemblance to Patty Duke in the role of Helen Keller. So I named her Helen, appointed myself Anne Sullivan, and learned the sign language alphabet (called, in those pre-PC days, the “deaf and dumb alphabet.”). My “Helen” was about three feet tall and her special feature was that she would walk if you led her by the hand. So I led “Helen” about and spelled words into her hand, just as I had seen Anne Sullivan do in the film.

I don’t know how long I persisted in this game with my “Helen Keller” doll but I do know that Helen Keller made a profound impression on me of someone who was handed massive obstacles and yet overcame them to put her mark on the world.

Several years later, I read a Reader’s Digest article by Helen Keller, describing in vivid detail what she would do if she were to receive the gift of sight and hearing for just 3 days. The article could have been, but was not, filled with poignant longing and self-pity. Instead, it was full of a reverence for the world of the senses. It was an inspiration and a reminder to appreciate the precious gifts of beauty we have access to just by virtune of being able to see and hear.

Things I learned about Helen Keller when I researched her recently didn’t quite penetrate into my awareness as a child. I had no understanding yet of what a feat it was for her to graduate from Radcliffe at the age of 24, only 17 years after she understood her first sign-language word! I didn’t realize what an accomplishment it was for her to learn to speak aloud words she could not hear, or to learn French, German, Latin and Greek in addition to English! So as I researched her, Helen Keller has continued to rise in my estimation. Finally, she devoted her life to traveling and speaking on behalf of the Foundation for the Blind. As someone who is very much interested in nonprofit work, I admire her for this as well.

Anne Frank: At first I hesitated to list Anne Frank as a woman who changed my life, because she was murdered in her teens and never became a grown woman. Nonetheless, the budding woman who left her legacy to the world had a profound influence on me.

I must have been 10 or 11 when I first read her diary. Wisely or unwisely, I had already been exposed to images and stories about the Holocaust, particularly at Jewish-run summer camps. In the mid-sixties, there was a definite focus on making sure that children born after World War II remembered the Nazi horror. So I don’t remember now whether I acted the part of Dussell, the old-fashioned and intolerant man who made it so difficult for Anne to sleep, before or after I first read her diary.

But I do know that I immediately fell in love with it. Horrible though their situation was, I found a certain romance in their Secret Annex and the measures they took to keep themselves from getting caught. I impressed my Barbie dolls into service and acted out scenes from the diary with them, with Barbie’s little sister Skipper playing the part of Anne.

I don’t know how many times I read Anne Frank’s diary while I was growing up. I do know she inspired me to start my own, in a daily planner bound as a hardcover book. Some days I had nothing to say, and it was hard to fill up that single page. As I grew older and had more to write about, I found the single page restrictive and sometimes my writing began to spill over onto the next page.

As I entered adolescence, I began to identify with Anne’s teenage struggles to find herself. Her fights with her mother mirrored mine even though the subject matter was surely different. She was critical of the Van Damm’s who shared their hiding place, especially Mrs. Van Damm, who, according to Anne, flirted openly with her father. As an early teen, I could well identify with the feeling of discovering the hypocrisy of the adult world. Growing up in the late sixties and early seventies, it seemed like the whole world was disgusted with the hypocrisy of previous generations.

But here came Anne’s one and only “love affair.” She and Peter both perished, and their brief happy time together turned out to be all they were ever going to get. If they were a little older, a little more rebellious it would have progressed further, and in a sense, why not? But they weren’t despairing. Anne was able to look out at her little strip of sky, all she could see of the outside world, and still have hope that the war would end, that persecution would end, and that she would live out her life in peace.

That didn’t happen, of course. The families were captured and of them all, only her father survived. By a remarkable stroke of luck, Anne’s diary was not destroyed when she was arrested, and that’s why we all know the inspiring story of the young woman who never got to be an adult, yet gave the world the gift of her optimism and courage.

Sometimes I wonder about Anne Frank. Suppose she had escaped and lived to a ripe old age. She might still be alive today. Would she have placed her mark on the world? Was she exceptional in her optimism and faith in humanity despite the horrors happening around her? Or would any other teenager under similar circumstances react the same way?

In fact we know that many people did not react the same way. Depression and suicide was not unusual at that time. In 1998 we visited my cousins, New York transplants living in the Netherlands since 1969. One day Fran took us to a Jewish cemetery in Wassenaar and pointed out that there was a jump in the number of headstones with death dates during the World War II period. Apparently many Jews, expecting the worst and not wanting to allow their fates to rest in hostile hands, committed suicide as the Nazis invaded the Netherlands.

But despite the deprivations, the days of sitting in silence lest the office workers below hear a floor creak above their heads, and the ever-present fear of being caught, Anne never expressed suicidal thoughts. Instead, she and her sister dutifully educated themselves and prepared for an adulthood after the war, an adulthood that never came. How many of us could stick to our lessons under similar circumstances? Wouldn’t it seem futile? And yet they persevered.

Also on that visit to the Netherlands, our very first stop was at the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. We got to climb up into the Secret Annex, which is now preserved as a museum, even to the postcards and pictures of movie stars that Anne and Margot kept on the wall. I was emotionally touched to be standing in the very rooms I’d read about so many years ago. I can’t say I felt Anne’s presence, but I felt as if the walls remembered her.

Anne Frank’s experiences and her belief in the goodness of humanity influenced me profoundly and started me on a lifetime of journaling, even though I have destroyed some of those journals. I owe her a great debt for being such an inspiration to me, and honor her as a “woman who changed my life.”

Jane Goodall: I was on my way to an interest in anthropology before I ever heard of Jane Goodall, but she was a major influence on me nevertheless.

As a child I developed an early interest in science. I read books about astronomy, and also about Earth’s pre-history. The development of life and the various stages of evolution that plants and animals went through in order to become what they are today fascinated me. So I read books about the dinosaurs, their environment, and the discovery of their bones.

This led me into reading books on human evolution. I read about Lucy, about Peking man, about Dart’s baby. I knew the names of the various species of hominids, knew their eras, and knew their tools and other artifacts. I was fascinated by the cave paintings and the ritual burials, heralding the dawn of a religion. I also was intrigued by the split off of humans from the other primates.

Although we did not yet know just how closely related humans and chimpanzees are, sharing over 98% of the same genes, in the 1960’s we did know that chimps are our closest animal relatives. So in 1966, when I heard there was going to be a National Geographic special on Jane Goodall, a young Englishwoman who went out to the African jungles to study chimps, I had to watch.

I was captivated immediately by Jane Goodall’s fearlessness and her intimate knowledge of the chimps. She actually gave them names, coded by letter for each family. Thus Flo, Freud, and Frodo were all of the same family line. She found a way to categorize the family groups and yet respect their individual personalities. This earned her the ridicule of many scientists who wanted to keep their distance from their animal subjects. Jane Goodall appeared on the cover of National Geographic, something that “serious scientists” never did. This earned her more ridicule, and remarks about “Blondes in the Jungle” began floating around.

Yet, Jane Goodall made discoveries that caused us to redefine our concept of what it means to be human. In the early sixties, she observed chimpanzees not only using tools but modifying natural objects to better suit their purposes. She saw chimps using thin sticks to poke into termite holes, and then withdraw them with termites clinging to them, for a tasty treat. Not only that but she also observed them stripping the twigs of leaves so they would better fit down the termite holes. So, this young woman who grew up in modest circumstances and had only a high school diploma when she began her fieldwork, revolutionized primatology as we know it today.

Later on, Jane Goodall went on to achieve a Ph.D. and to found the Jane Goodall Institute. In her seventies now, she still travels the world for an exhausting 50 weeks a year, speaking on behalf of her beloved chimps, animal rights, impoverished people, and the environment. For two weeks each year, she takes a “vacation” in the Gombe where she first began her studies, refreshing and renewing her spirit.

Dr. Goodall has faced other turning points in her life. In “Through a Glass, Darkly,” she records later observations of chimps that revealed their dark side. In short, chimps, especially young male chimps, make war on their own kind, maiming and killing chimps from other troops. Even female chimps can be killers, sometimes slaying and eating a rival’s infants. This discovery put her at odds with much of the scientific world, that did not want to hear that the human propensity for cruelty and violence may be imprinted in our genes. In her spiritual memoirs, “Reason for Hope,” Dr. Goodall gives us insight into the spiritual struggle she went through while absorbing this unwanted information.

Yet Jane Goodall does find reason for hope, and she finds it in youth. Through the Jane Goodall Institute she has founded Roots and Shoots, which engages young people around the world, from preschoolers to college students, in projects to benefit animals, impoverished peoples, and the environment. As Jane Goodall says, she can’t save the whole world, and these groups of young people are doing the work that she cannot. Yet, she firmly believes that every one of us can make a discernible difference in making the world a better place.

Jane Goodall’s influence led me into majoring in anthropology. I had visions of going on fossil digs, until I realized that one scorpion or one hideously large insect would send me fleeing homeward on the next plane. But all my life I have admired and respected Jane Goodall for what she has accomplished, armed at first with only a high school degree, secretarial training, and a huge helping of courage and compassion. She has spent 50 years following her dream of a better world with kindness for all earth’s creatures.

Jane Goodall is the only one of these 3 women I had the privilege of meeting in person, at Danbury Connecticut last April. It was a peak moment for me to be able to tell her that when I had breast cancer, I put seeing her in person on my “bucket list” and how happy I was to finally speak to her in person as she autographed one of her books for me.

It would not be fair to praise these three outstanding women without mentioning the women who stood behind them. For Helen Keller, it was Anne Sullivan’s love, perseverance and dedication that made it possible to become her best self. For Anne Frank, it was the courage of Miep Geis, a Dutch woman who brought necessities to Anne Frank and her family and helped them to escape detection as long as they did. For Jane Goodall, it was her mother, Vanne Goodall, who accompanied Jane into the bush for the first months of her fieldwork, when Tanzanian officials would not permit a lone woman to camp there. They, too, deserve to be honored during Women’s History Month.

All three women, Helen Keller, Anne Frank, and Jane Goodall, came to my attention and earned my admiration while I was still a child. Today, I still admire them for their determination, their bravery, their compassion, and their hope. They have influenced me in ways I had not examined closely before deciding to make this presentation, and it is my pleasure to bring their stories to you. Thank you.

Official Language

2008-03-08T20:55:00.000-08:00

I don't care if it sounds un-PC. English should be our official language in this country, and no one should be required to be bilingual for any job.

Otherwise, in just a few years, no one in New York City will be able to work unless he or she is bilingual, and of course the most proficient people will be the ones who have been here the shortest length of time. American born children raised by American born parents will be completely left behind.

Today I was infuriated. While walking on Avenue U we saw two signs in a store window. One was spelled incorrectly. Okay, no one knows how to spell English or properly speak English anymore. That's bad enough, but the other sign in the same window said help wanted, but demanded that the applicants must speak Russian.

Well, excuse me. They can't be bothered to learn English properly, but no American can get a job in their store? This is despicable. It's going to completely undermine our economy if it is allowed to continue.

Oh, sure, we should all learn a foreign language, and kids should be taught in public school. First of all, that's balderdash. They do a completely incompetent job of teaching kids a foreign language. So who is going to get these bilingual jobs? The American born kid who has 3 years of high school foreign language, or the alien? Sorry, American kid, do not pass go, do not collect a salary.

Plus, there are so many immigrants coming in from so many places that it is not possible for any American to learn all these languages and therefore even the playing field. My grandfather spoke 6 languages, but he came from a wealthy family in Greece, and had no need to work until he came to the States. So he had plenty of time to learn all those tongues. Around here you'd have to know Russian, Chinese or maybe Korean to get a job in a local store. In other parts of the city it's Spanish. What's an American supposed to do? Learn fourteen languages?

I think we need to legislate so that Americans will have the leg up getting jobs. Otherwise, our own kids in this next generation will be sitting on the sidelines while the children of foreigners snap up the all the jobs.