Three cheers for television
Face-to-face conversation is a basic human need. It’s how we learn to speak and think — how we form and maintain relationships. When practiced by consenting adults with courtesy and curiosity, it is one of life’s great pleasures. Conversation has been practiced and refined for centuries: from salon, to coffee house, to cocktail party, to…
Read MoreReverse the Curse: Red Tent/Real World
Recently, I read a story about a young woman in rural Nepal who burned to death because she was having her period. Partabi Bogati was following the ancient Hindu practice of chhaupadi (from a word that means “impurity”), which sees menstruating women as bearers of disease, disaster and bad luck; they are barred from handling…
Read MoreWomen of the 116th Congress: Looking Good
I can’t stop looking at the New York Times special feature, “Redefining Representation: The Women of the 116th Congress.” This gallery of 130 — of the 131 — female senators and representatives is a celebration of racial, ethnic, religious and geographical diversity. It’s full of firsts: first Native American women (plural!), first Muslim women (plural!),…
Read MoreWalking the dog, winter edition. Brrrrr
I am outside and the app on my phone tells me it’s only 20 degrees. I haven’t had any coffee yet and I forgot one of my gloves, or maybe it’s lost; I lose a lot of gloves. The commuters sprint by, hoping to make it to the streetcar before it pulls away, lest they…
Read MoreYou talking to me? Language nerd/ 21st century edition
Reading The New Yorkeris a weekly pleasure – not just the cartoons, though they are reliably wonderful. A few weeks ago, (12/17/18) I came across an article about artificial facial recognition, “Here’s Looking at You” by staff writer David Owens. It begins in an Irish cow barn where cameras record the actions of Bossy and…
Read MorePittsburgh massacre: I’m glad my Holocaust survivor parents weren’t alive to see this
Watching the TV coverage of the slow-rolling horror in Pittsburgh, I thought: I’m glad my mother is not alive to see this. My mother was 92 when she died, a year ago. She was 15 when the Nazis marched into Paris. Her brother was turned in by a neighbor and died in Auschwitz and she…
Read MorePost-Kavanaugh: We have only begun to fight
The week before the vote, I said good morning to my neighbor, who answered, “He’s not going to be confirmed is he? I said, “Yes, he is.” She looked horrified. I was equally horrified, but I didn’t doubt the outcome. The old bulls (as Dan Rather called the old white men who defend power and…
Read MoreFree-for-All: The students arrive in Boston
The sidewalk in my Brookline neighborhood is a free-for-all – literally. The students are coming and more to the point, the students are going and leaving behind mountains of stuff: cat-shredded couches, chairs missing legs or seats, and a million giant garbage bags stuffed with the flotsam of student life: clothes, pillows, half empty jars…
Read MoreShakespeare is Everywhere
After reading The New York Times rave about The Taming of the Shrew at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, I got cranky. And I mean cranky like a five-year-old in the supermarket who wants Sugar Smacks (which are now called “Honey” Smacks, for obvious reasons.) But I can’t go to Garrison in upstate New York to see…
Read More“Crush” no more?
Maybe I should stop calling it a crush. Last spring, I signed up for the Shakespeare Workout (an all-level, no-prior-experience-necessary acting class offered by Actor’s Shakespeare Project in Boston.) Since then, I’ve been to as many live performances of as many Shakespeare plays as I could get to, watched several more on video, lurked at…
Read More