Sally Diamond and Ed Baierlein in Harold Pinter’s The Lover, courtesy of Westword

It was saddening to discover five years ago that after more than a 40-year run Germinal Stage was closing and artistic director Ed Baierlein along with Sally Diamond, his talented actor, director, and costumer wife, had left the building.

Sadder still to learn this week that Ed has died. Death simply didn’t seem possible.

Germinal saw the light when there was very little theatre in the Denver area and was put together by Ed’s intelligence, curiosity, courage and out-and-out stubborn intention. His choice of plays was intriguing. The shows might be tragic (Ibsen) or funny (Alan Bennett). They may come from the minds of American talents (Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams) or Europeans (Harold Pinter, Ionesco).

While change swirled in the Denver theatre world outside, from ditzy musicals, 1950s hits, experimental to highly political to sweetly soothing, Ed stood firm in his beliefs and introduced audiences to works that they were unlikely to have encountered before. Germinal spoke and breathed Ed and soon became a courageous backbone of the theatre world.

One of the first things you noticed on entering the building was the waft of Ed’s pipe smoke, the second the dozens of photographs of productions past that filled the walls with images of dozens of actors, many of whom you saw at their youngest and, moving on, developing maturity over the years. Then you went to the ticket booth where you’d find Ed behind the window like a kindly genie holding out the gift of a ticket.

Ed himself was a first-rate actor. Not flashy, not hilariously funny (though he could be) not preening or self-conscious. Quiet, somewhat soft-spoken, yet so fully immersed in the role that he effortlessly drew interest.

As a reviewer over some fifteen years (or perhaps twenty as so many theatre experiences tended to meld together) I saw hundreds of plays--two every weekend--some thrilling and others causing you to check your watch every twenty minutes hoping soon to be freed. But to this day I find onstage moments that linger and never leave my memory.

Many years ago Ed played in Death of a Salesman and the scene that sticks is the passionate fight between Willy Loman and his angry desperate son Biff, played by then youngster Conor O’Farrell. As I remember it, they were standing together on a staircase, the older man grieving the failure of his life, the younger full of heat and sorrow...and there was something deeply moving between them.

Then there was George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House in which Ed played Captain Shotover and Kristina Denise Pitt appeared as the much younger Ellie who has nonetheless fallen in love with him. As they sit talking quietly together she is thinking with some trepidation about a marriage to which she feels committed; he was offering advice. Watching, I couldn’t help thinking that this Shotover, assessing his own life, a little weary but offering the wisdom of accumulated years to a bright young woman, was a representation of Ed himself,

News of a death like Ed’s, a man whose art had so long strongly affected viewers and also influenced Denver’s theatre world leaves a hollow in the chest, a sense of irreparable loss. I have conjured up a fantasy in which somewhere in the universe there’s a floating booth exuding swirls of pipe smoke and here you can see a man behind the glass window inviting you inside.

Deepest thanks to Ed Baierlein and Sally Diamond for what they have given us

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These beautiful eggs come from Croft Family Farm

1. Most of us don’t know much about where our food comes from, what kind of tending makes vegetables nutritious and delicious, how fruit can be protected from late spring snows, and apples from worms. You’ll find farmers at the market happy to discuss all this with you (though of course not when there’s a crowd surrounding the stand) and also discuss cooking methods--yours and theirs--and how to store.

2. Organic food is healthier than processed and there’s little doubt the food you find in the supermarket has been raised with the help of poisonous chemicals many of which are banned in other countries.

3. Speaking of poison, eating and cooking organic and supporting the farmers who use this method goes some way toward healing our damaged world.

4. And those farmers need our support. I’m guessing very few local farmers are wealthy. One late spring storm, one insect invasion, a lack of sufficient moisture can destroy an entire year’s crop. And these days we’re wondering about possible dangers to their strong and necessary workers.

5. Did you pay attention to the discussion about food chains and food availability during the original Covid pandemic and wonder if you’d ever eat beef or find eggs again? Are you worrying now? Local farmers aren’t getting their fruits, vegetable--and perhaps fertilizer--from other parts of the globe. Some will deliver to your door during a crisis. Most will still set up stands and work through the market.

6. You have a dog or cat. You love animals. And in order to enjoy your bacon or steak you need to put aside what you know about the ugly, torturous treatment of animals in conventional husbandry. I’m not a vegetarian and it at least feels better to know the sentient creatures that provide meat lived reasonably peaceful and pleasant lives--at least until the final day.

7. The more you know about food--the season when asparagus is best tasted; the wondrous freshness of an ear of corn plucked early that very morning; how to join the line for the first and most juicy peaches--the better you’ll cook and the more crazy delicious the dinners you prepare for friends and family will be.

8. The market is friendly and fun and also provides vendors of fine prepared foods: salami better than any you’ve ever found sliced in the supermarket, a killer balsamic vinegar, beautifully prepared chocolate treats, and tasty hummus.

***

I know not everyone can afford the higher price of organic food and I truly don’t want to sound preachy--although I do tend to think that the market is worth frequenting if we can afford buying coffee at Starbucks or eating in expensive restaurants. And perhaps it’s worth a trip to the market just to savor a nibble or two or buy a sweet treat for a child.

I received a blessing this morning.

There’s a man whose singing appears on Facebook and Instagram and whose every song carries messages of God. He has a rich baritone and sings with profound joy. I don’t know much about who the singer is (his introduction is SALM L.M.K.), where he comes from, or whether he is part of any particular church or organization. I do know that when I encounter him in the morning, between perhaps a thoughtful comment by Malcolm X and a Betty Boop cartoon on Facebook, he cheers my day.

I have shared this singer’s videos twice on my page and twice he has personally responded with thanks. Are these words truly personal or do they come from some kind of list or with a request for money? Neither I think. They sound as sincere as his singing. Here is the latest: “Juliet Wittman, thanks very much. I’m so grateful for such words. You’re a blessing. Be blessed.”

Tears came.

I notice blessings often receive a warm response. How often, scrolling, do you encounter the lovely Irish blessing that begins “May the road rise to meet you” and find yourself smiling as you share?

I was intensely religious throughout my teens. I had no interest in organized religion, however, and only rarely went to the synagogue although I was fiercely proud of being Jewish.

I think the interest started with Graham Greene whose work I discovered at the age of fourteen with an early novel, Brighton Rock. Greene was a passionate Catholic but also rebellious--he called himself an “agnostic Catholic”-- and his questioning aroused the ire of the church.

The protagonist in Brighton Rock was Pinky, a young criminal who believed in the saying “Between the saddle and the ground/ He mercy sought and mercy found.” This meant that anyone who repeated a prayer even seconds before death would be saved. Alas, this belief didn’t serve Pinky well.

And then came the far more complex novel, The Power and the Glory, in which a priest who had broken the tenets of the church, and who Greene dubbed the whisky priest because he drank alcohol and betrayed celibacy having fathered a daughter. He lived in a state in Mexico where at the time Catholicism was banned and a priest could face execution. Despite the danger, the whisky priest went from place to place ministering to the poor--many of whom longed for benediction--in the belief that God could manifest even through his sad and tainted body.

This mingling of wrongdoing with shining virtue amazed me and I was entirely sure that as he stumbled toward execution the whisky priest found the mercy he had earned.

That was the beginning. I read the Bible from the Old Testament to the New, though I did occasionally skip a passage. I dived into biographies of saints, trying to fathom what qualities won sainthood. It did seem to almost always require oppression and some kind of hideous death. Also I found myself intensely disliking St. Theresa who dubbed herself Little Flower and--if I remember her book correctly--was filled with rage when a young French student offered her a helpful hand as she descended train steps. How dare this toxic young male touch her sacred body? This woman seemed to me mimsy, self-absorbed, and downright stupid, saint or not.

It was easy to avoid established religion when, despite an established Church of England, the Brits were far lest religious than their American counterparts. According to an old joke they attended church only three times in life--when hatched, matched, or dispatched. But there was no way to avoid the beauty of religion itself.

Unlike many of the Jewish students at my grammar school I never resented morning assembly where hymns were routinely sung. We were allowed not to sing and had our own assemblies in the gym, but I could never resist those lovely songs.

There was also the Royal Albert Hall where my kindly brother-in-law introduced me to music. In those post-war years the arts were strongly supported by the government and you didn’t need a lot of money to hear, as I did and for the first time, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Handel, their works rising perceptibly to heaven. At the National Gallery I found myself sitting on a bench for perhaps half an hour staring at El Greco’s “Christ on the Cross” or stopping to gaze at a medieval Madonna and Child. How could a child so tenderly cherished be so cruelly murdered as a man?

And those churches, the magnificent cathedrals, the beautiful buildings you found in rural Britain. Just step inside one of these, many built over centuries and by workers and architects spurred by passion and belief and you found your spirits soaring.

True, I did sometimes find myself grumbling about why all this miraculous art could be claimed solely by Christianity but of course art wasn’t and isn’t. We Jews have visual artists, musicians (think Leonard Bernstein), dancers, and film makers (my mother met Alexander Korda in London, the Jewish immigrant from Hungary who started up British film making). There have been scientists and philosophers too, many Nobel prize winners and of course Einstein.

I was told Jews were people of the book which I took to mean we treasured knowledge and read a lot though it actually refers to the Torah. Still, we have hordes of wonderful writers from Franz Kafka to Isaac Bashevis Singer to Primo Levi to Hannah Arendt to Philip Roth. Have you seen Fiddler on the Roof dozens of times and found yourself admiring the dialogue, feeling, and songs every time? Thank the author Sholem Aleichem whose stories created the backbone, musician Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnic lyricist and Joseph Stein who wrote the text.

Best of all is the fact that Jews are very good at being funny. What can you expect from a people whose past is so shadowy and grim? Today we still have Mel Brooks (close to a hundred years old) and Jon Stewart among others. Sometime back, sadly, we lost Gilda Radner the funniest comedian I’ve ever watched. Further back still you get Lenny Bruce and the Marx Brothers. And of course there are many more.

There are books written about the murderous history of religion--the Crusades, women burned as witches, the Spanish Inquisition. The long, one-time oppression of Catholics in England. The wars fought in so many parts of the world for power and land. There is too much to be said here about the present time and what is happening here, in a country where the Secretary of Defense titles himself Secretary of War and promotes a Christian Nationalism that, he insists, requires mass slaughter. Within another nation--which purports to represent Judaism-- genocide against Palestine is embraced, along with bombing attacks on other countries. Israel has been relentlessly oppressing Palestine for decades and the great wave of destruction has lifted high and is crashing down over and over again destroying homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, and even a synagogue in Lebanon. Journalists in Gaza are shot and snipers murder children with direct and deliberate shots to their heads and chests. Starving mothers watch the babies they can no longer feed die of starvation as Israel blocks the entry of blankets, medications, clothes, water and food, often killing the aid workers attempting to deliver.

For many years I wore a small gold Mogen David around my neck, a gift from my Hungarian stepfather, who himself had suffered Nazi imprisonment. With some sadness several years ago, having learned of Israel’s bestial crimes, I slipped it off and put it away. I had been taught from the beginning that Judaism profoundly values human life.

Decades ago Victor Gollancz, a writer born to a German Jewish family, published a book called A Year of Grace that stitched together my scattered and confused ideas. He had gathered the thoughts, writings, sermons, and ideas of priests, rabbis, clerics, mullahs, poets, essayists, philosophers--literally dozens of people who had devoted their lives to understanding religion--and his results were grouped in chapters with names like “Joy and Praise,” “Good and Evil,” “Acceptance,” “Freedom,” “The Self.” With him I encountered people from many countries, along with poets like William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, as well as quotes from Beethoven, Goethe, Oscar Wilde, and Aldous Huxley.

My favorite entry concerned a rabbi who, as he was returning home, saw a group of thieves walking away down the road with all his possessions. He stopped, stood aside, joined his hands and murmured “I give this to you” as each robber passed.

He wanted none of them damned, he explained later.

From all these riches I took a single essential understanding: There are myriad religions and myriad ways of worship in this world of ours, a disparate collection whose ideas and rituals vary greatly. Yet despite their singularity I could sense that the most crucial beliefs of the world’s great religions were wonderfully shared.

I think in every one of us there is a yearning, a search, a desire to understand the wonders of this world and the meaning of our lives, a longing for transcendence. That transcendence can be found sometimes in music, words put together by poets and novelists, an unexpected smile from a stranger, the sense that we ourselves have done something that--no matter how small it is--might put a flicker of kindness out into the universe. And of course in giving and receiving blessing.

****

There are several of Rabindranath Tagore’s lilting poems in A Year of Grace and here is my favorite:

When I go from hence
let this be my parting word,
that what I have seen is unsurpassable.

I have tasted of the hidden honey of this lotus
that expands on the ocean of light,
and thus am I blessed
—-let this be my parting word.

In this playhouse of infinite forms
I have had my play
and here have I caught sight of him that is formless.

My whole body and my limbs
have thrilled with his touch who is beyond touch;
and if the end comes here, let it come
—-let this be my parting word.

Jada Suzanne Dixon Courtesy of Curious

Denver audiences were in for a shock four years ago when Chip Walton and Dee Covington, the two founders of Curious Theatre, announced they were retiring. The twenty-four year-old company had been bringing fascinating contemporary work to the town for longer than two decades, plays that explored significant issues and had audiences discussing what they’d seen all the way home or--perhaps somewhat less frequently--emitting waves of laughter while watching.

Passionate theatre-goers were worried. Would Curious keep going? And if so would the company still create surprising and wonderful plays? Would they continue to employ some of Denver’s best directors, actors, musicians, and tech people? Would it still inhabit the beautiful church that had been so artfully renovated?

There was no need to worry: The Curious enterprise was almost immediately placed in the talented and competent hands of actor-director Jada Suzanne Dixon who had been part of the company’s team for a decade. She took over in the Fall of 2022 and it was immediately clear that she planned to adopt her predecessors’ mantra: “No guts. No glory.”

“Chip was such an integral component to this organization as was Dee,” she said in an interview. “They were bedrock and what a wonderful opportunity it was for me to step into their big shoes and continue to move that legacy forward. The mission has not changed. We kept the ethos and DNA and are deeply rooted in a mission to involve the community in provocative issues.”

The current production, Birthday Candles, written by Noah Haidle and--having received generous praise from the New York Times--has one more weekend to play in Denver. At the head of a strong cast is Ernestine, played by the ever warm and wise Gabriella Cavallero. During the production’s ninety minutes Ernestine ages from her teens to older than a hundred. “It is beautifully human,” Jada says, “and speaks to universal themes: family, time, love, and loss. It’s both intimate and expansive at the same time, deeply moving asking how you look at the extraordinary in the ordinary. Birthday Candles invites audiences to reflect on their own lives. It’s beautiful, funny, moving, and deeply theatrical.

“That’s what drew us in.”

For those wanting to be drawn in tickets are available at box office 303-623-0524 or boxoffice@curioustheatre.org; the theatre itself is at 1080 Acoma St. For information on dates and times, along with some interesting observations, go to: https://www.curioustheatre.org/event/birthday-candles/

Keeping Curious going has been a difficult task but an inspiring one according to Jada: “For us, bringing audiences back and rebuilding the habit of live theatre were important, as well was reminding people why we have to be in the room together. Also creating work that’s relevant while also being welcoming and a story that sparks connection. We want to make sure people feel this is a place for them.”

Jada’s task has also been putting a strong and well-functioning team together and she has been successful: Curious still has an “amazing powerhouse company of actors, designers, and playwrights,” she says. “People who know us well and whom we built strong trust in. And we’re also opening doors for new artists.

“Many patrons have been coming for a long time,” she adds. “For years. One woman said, ‘I don’t love every show at Curious but I will see every one because I know it’s going to make me think.’”

The work “hasn’t all been wine and roses,” Jada says. “But there’s been a lot of joy in navigating and shifting audience habits. It’s been challenging but also deeply energizing.

“What matters most is artistic excellence and creating experiences people really want to be a part of.”

Robert De Niro is getting into character. He’s been talking to his agent about doing some kind of working class movie, something set in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, or the factories of New Jersey. Something gritty that shows the fears and concerns of the men involved in America’s doomed industries.

 “Real people,” he mutters, facing his own reflection in the mirror. “Some kind of real, regular guy, for Chrissake.”

He tries it a couple of ways. First he tenses his shoulders and lifts them a little, balling his hands into fists so that the thick muscles of his upper arms bulge. Then he pulls a strand of black hair over his eyes and glowers through it. “OK,” he says thoughtfully. “Kind of a tough guy thing. Could work.

“He could be king of the walk and then lose his job. Show some vulnerability, lose his wife...Nah.” De Niro starts angrily pushing his hair away from his face again. “Who needs pathos?” he asks the mirror. “Who hasn’t seen that tough but vulnerable thing a million times? Shit.”

He circles the room a few times. “Worker, worker, worker,” he recites to himself in a kind of furious mantra. Then he suddenly rushes to the bathroom, grabs a jar of Vaseline, darts back to the mirror. He’s humming “Someone left my cake out in the rain,” and it’s coming out all plummy and filled with easy emotion. He shoves Vaseline into his hair till it’s glossy and plastered to his skull. He smiles a mocking, know-it-all smile, and imagines its curves echoed by a vicious pencil-stroke of mustache. He makes his eyes opaque—black and beady. “Closer,” he says gleefully. “Closer.”

He puffs out his chest and tries a strutting little walk. He goes back to the mirror, places his hand over his heart and sings again: “I don’t know if I can take it”—here he closes up his eyes so hard that he actually squeezes out a couple of tears through the lids—”For it took so long to bake it, and I’ll never have the recipe agaaiiiin....”

“Okay,” says De Niro. “I think we’re onto something here.”

****

One summer night, De Niro walks into the Purple Hen in Tenafly, New Jersey. A tall, skinny man in blue jeans and a black T-shirt is ambling past. He brushes against the actor. “Sorry, pal,” he says, with a comfortable, chest-deep laugh. “Just couldn’t wait for some of that cold wet stuff.”

“S’Okay,” says De Niro. “I know how you feel.” And he trails the man to the bar, where they find themselves elbow to elbow, waiting for the bartender’s attention. “I’m Vince,” says the tall man, extending a hard-skinned hand.

“Bobby,” responds De Niro.

De Niro starts coming into the Purple Hen once or twice a week and the men who hang out there nightly get comfortable with him. Fortunately, he’s done his homework as well as he always does. So when they ask where he works, he is able to tell them that he does TV repair at Dudley’s—which is just outside of town. And why, then, they want to know, does he come all the way into and across town to drink at the Purple Hen? A knowing man-to-man grimace. “It’s my old lady. She can’t stand for me to be out with the boys. Comes to wherever I’m at, towing one of the kids along half the time. Crying. Nagging. I gotta get away once in a while.”

A ripple of sympathetic laughter, and the men begin to accept him. Their warmth grows when, after a few visits, De Niro lets on that he knows how to play the piano. Just a little, he adds, with a self-deprecating grin.

Vince strides over to the Purple Hen’s ancient piano and tosses open the lid.  “Ain’t been tuned for a coupla decades,” he says, “but let’s see how you do.”

Now De Niro is rapidly shifting through his memories. As it happens, he can play a little. He took lessons in classical music and jazz improvisation on both piano and horn for his role in “New York, New York,” and a couple of the musicians hired for the film told him he was good enough to go pro (though of course it wasn’t De Niro himself that moviegoers watching his image heard).

So De Niro sits at the grimy keyboard in the warm, dark atmosphere of the Purple Hen, bathed in his new friends’ admiration and acceptance. But he knows it’s not De Niro being asked to play. It’s Bobby. And Bobby doesn’t play jazz or classical.

Tentatively, he starts picking out the melody to “MacArthur Park” with his right hand. He adds a few vibrating chords and lets them build to a thunder. Then, very softly at first, he begins to sing. He sings the way he did in front of the mirror when Bobby first came into being until, keyboard almost forgotten and caressed only with his left-hand fingertips, he’s standing, hand over heart, voice pulsing with the sweet emotion of the song.

As the quivering notes die away, Vince and his buddies laugh and applaud like crazy. “Hey, Bobby,” they cry, “Eh, Bobbo, didn’t know you had it in you,” and Bobby segues smoothly into “Starlight.”

But when he comes home after that first night of playing, De Niro knows he’ll have to do some work on the role. He is getting tired of Bobby’s endless smirking and rib-poking, his sexist jokes. And he knows it’s going to get really boring just pounding out things like “I left my heart in San Francisco” on the piano. No. Bobby is going to have to grow as a character.

De Niro has shaved the mustache and allowed a glimmer of his own humorous intelligence to show through his creation. One night, as Bobby plays “Kiss Today Goodbye,” he feels someone slide onto the piano stool next to him. A firm olive-skinned thigh, its top skimmed by the shortest of blue skirts, rests by his pants leg. Someone starts singing along with him in a breathy, uncertain little girl’s voice and the words “What I did for love, what I did for love,” slide confidingly into his left ear and nestle there.

“Nice goin’, Bobby,” yells Vince. “Looks like you’ve snared my little sis. Eh, Bernie,” he goes on at the top of his voice, “Watch what you’re doin’. You’re picking on a married man theah.”

“I can look after myself,” she says, shaking her hair back. “And it’s Bernice, you big ape.”

Bernice is no ordinary Tenafly daughter. She is as smooth and rounded as a plum; you could get lost in the black haze of her hair and her fingernails are the deep pink-purple color of a deadly nightshade flower. Ever since high school, Vince brags to Bobby, their friends have been calling Bernice “the gypsy” because of her looks, exotic style and unconventional behavior.

She sings along with the piano all night. Once, she walks away to refresh her make-up in the ladies’ room. She leaves a second time to get herself a pina colada from the bar. “I love them,” she says to Bobby. “They make me think of tropical nights and the sea. The barkeep makes ‘em for me special.” She fishes out the maraschino cherry and holds it between her teeth, leans toward him. Bobby moves forward too and nibbles at the cherry. Then he curves his hand behind her head and kisses her tentatively. Looking up, he sees Vince frowning.

At 4 a.m., when the bar closes, Bernice asks Bobby to walk her home. Vince’s expression is still clouded, but he waves when he sees them leave and says, “So long, Bobbo. Seeya.”

Bobby starts talking about renting a little house a few blocks from the Purple Hen. One night, he has just parked his car and is walking to the bar when Vince appears out of the dark, grabs him and pins him up against the wall in one furious movement. “Awright, Bob,” he hisses, his words scented with whiskey, “what the fuck’s going on? Yer a married man, dammit. What the fuck are you doin’ messin’ with my sister?”

Bobby squirms, holds back the impulse to hit Vince, finally says, “I’m separated, Vince. She’s a cold woman, my wife. Hard and cold. We’re separated, man. We’re through. I’m fuckin’ serious about your sister.”

****

Bernice moves in with Bobby. She has a talent for interior design and she soon makes over his entire house. She paints the walls, cabinets and closets in shades of purple, pink, fuschia, choosing carpeting and curtains from the same pulsating family of colors, studying catalogs and cloth swatches from local stores. She paints four golden Turkish turrets up the corners of the room, topping them with tulip-shaped domes. “I love you,” Bobby says, when he returns from a hard day of work to find her happy, sweaty and paint-smeared. And he pulls the hair pins out of her hair so that it cascades to her shoulders and tugs his fingers gently through the lacquered strands, making little circles with the pads of his fingers against her skull. “I love you,” he repeats, cupping her round breasts in his hands, then leading her to the dusty-blue bedroom.

An hour later, he calls Vince and tells him to get his ass over for some poker, to bring the boys and tell them their wives can come along too. Nobody’s gonna believe, he says exultantly into the phone, what Bernice has done to the place.

****

But before the guests come, De Niro goes to wash up. The bathroom walls are of ersatz black marble, veined with gold, and the taps are gold too. He bathes, then sits on the edge of the tub and clips his toenails into a tiny, gilt wastepaper basket. He is puzzled. Something keeps pushing at the edges of his memory. His eye follows the traceries on the wall, and he sees a 20-room mansion by a pounding azure sea in southern California. In his mind, he enters the mansion and room after room opens before him, white, airy, filled with books and music and gracefully curved sculpture. In the innermost room is a round bed and on it lies his wife. His other wife. Six foot tall, slender and gloriously blonde, limbs relaxed on the coverlet.

****

Halfway through the party, Bobby is forced to drive out to the store for more beer. Vince, his cousin Jimmy, and several of the boys are standing around in the kitchen, a little sloshed, making conversation.

“You know who he is, dontcha?” says Jimmy, cocking his head toward the doorway where Bobby has just gone out.

“Dunno what you mean,” says Vince.

“Yeah,” says Jimmy. “You do. I know you do. He’s that movie star...”

“Oh, yeah,” pipes up a short, pimpled man. “The one in that Godfather movie that makes people offers they can’t refuse.”

They all laugh. “That was Marlon Brando,” says Jimmy. “But he was in that movie too. And a whole bunch of other movies. De Niro. I swear he’s Robert De Niro.”

“Robert De Niro,” says Vince thoughtfully. “That’s right. I kinda knew that somewhere all along. You know,” he goes on after a pause, “I don’t think we better tell the girls about this. They’d get all crazy and excited and start pestering him for autographs and shit...”

“And women can’t keep their mouths shut,” says the short man. “They’d be blabbing it all over, and the next thing you know, the neighborhood would be full of reporters and fans and Hollywood types and he’d just hafta take off again to wherever he came from.”

“I think it’s nice of him to come stay with us,” says Jimmy. “He’s probably trying to do his bit for the working man or some such. Wanting to help us out.”

“Oh, I don’t know it’s so nice,” says Vince. “He gets Bernice. And after all, the guy has gotta be somewhere.”

****

Actually, the women would be far less surprised than their husbands imagine. Marilyn Monroe is sitting in the living room with them. She has been joining these women in Tenafly for Thursday night bridge and occasional other pursuits for as many years as they can remember. At the moment she’s saying breathily, “I know I shouldn’t but it’s just sooo good,” and coating a potato chip with onion dip.

Marilyn’s hair is gray. The translucent skin the camera once loved is dissected with wrinkles, the famous body thickened and softened. But the voice is still that of a shy little girl. And the sex goddess spirit still flickers. Every now and then she will decide to “be Marilyn” out on the street. Then all it takes is a tiny tilt of the chin, a tremor of the mouth, something melting in the movement of her hips, and Tony, the stolid old grocer, finds himself pausing as he hoses off the boxes of fruit outside his shop and wondering with shame why he is filled with sudden lust for the elderly woman who has just paused to finger his grapes.

But Marilyn never plays these games around the women—or their husbands, who know her only as Mims. Now she stoops to retrieve the youngest, plumpest child from the carpet and swing him into the air. As she tosses her head back, the lamp behind her blazes her hair into the white-gold silk all movie goers remember. “So pookums,” she says with her sweet silly giggle, as the child giggles helplessly with her. “So pookums, is you happy your Auntie Marilyn’s come home?”

New York City in the 1960s was a constant astonishment. Performances in attics, churches, basements, coffee shops, and on the streets. Experiments and surprises that ranged from naked actors making love onstage to the huge Broadway success of A Chorus Line, a musical in which, for more or less the first time, the actors’ personal monologues were utilized for the script and transformed into dance, catchy songs and a fascinating narrative.

By the1970s I was in Denver where the Denver Center for the Performing Arts was opening with Bertold Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. This starred a brilliant and hitherto unknown young actress: Tyne Daly.

Not every Denver production I saw over the years after that was inspiring but many were. I’m guessing that some readers might get bored if--for the hundredth time--I can’t help listing revelatory stage moments and the stunning and memorable work of several actors. I’ll refrain.

Being old and retired changes many things and I’m getting to far fewer productions than I used to see. Because I tire easily. Because I can’t drive. Sometimes because I’m physically out of sorts. And also--forgive me for saying this--because there’s a limit to how many times I can see the same ancient play again.

So here I am. Wavering. Sometimes lazy. And also deeply missing the theatre world I loved so long and used to share. And then BETC issued an invitation to its production of John Patrick Shanley’s Brooklyn Laundry, a brief show but so delicious, so beautifully put together in terms of set and lights, so alive, that having watched, I knew it was time to re-enter.

Shanley is the author of, among many things, the multi-award-winning play Doubt and the poignant, romantic comedy Moonstruck, which made it into a much-lauded movie. BETC’s Allison Watrous, who directs, loves Stanley’s work and understands it to a T. Many critics have defined Brooklyn Laundry as a rom com and, to an extent, it is. But in the hands of Watrous and her gifted actors, it also goes deeper.

In the beginning we encounter Fran, excellently played by Annie Barbour, entering the Brooklyn laundry with a bag of clothing. She is not a particularly pleasant character. Fran is annoyed that a previous bundle of clothes was mislaid though paid for and--in fact--pretty much everything seems to annoy her. Torsten Hillhouse’s Owen, the laundry owner, comes across as warm and good natured even as he teasingly describes his customer as gloomy--which of course she resents--and invites her to have dinner with him. Over time you come to understand the setbacks and disappointments in his life too. They’re interesting, these two, but they’re certainly not meeting cute. Shanley is too inventive for cliches.

The second scene changes everything. One of the reasons for Fran’s gloom, we discover, is a sister, Trish, dying of cancer in a trailer in Pennsylvania. Fran loves and visits this sister, but she’s unpartnered, unsure of what she wants for the rest of her own life and also acutely aware that care for Trish’s two children will fall into her hands. Trish is smiling frequently during the visit, sometimes satiric and very much present, sometimes afraid and lost, sometimes drifting away. As played by the luminous and expressive Jessica Robblee there’s a kind of diaphanous veil between Trish and the other world she’s about to enter. Yet the interaction between the two sisters is very much of this world and we’re beginning to understand and care for Fran.

Eventually Owen and Fran do go to dinner. She is on magic mushroom and offers some to him across the table. Things are softening in the world the two are in together, talking quietly, lights above the table incandescent. Although the magic doesn’t stop Fran from complaining that she can’t get chicken.

Things get hot, loud, and fast afterwards with the entry of Susie, a third sister who, too, is dying of cancer and who also is a mother. Kate Gleason brings her to powerful, desperate life and there’s nothing transcendent in this death discussion: Fran yells. Susie explodes.

Will Owen and Fran get together? There’s a lot of shouting between the two of them as well and it’s hard to say. You’ll have to attend yourself and and decide.

Here are the dates:

Friday, March 6, 7:00 pm
Saturday, March 7, 7:00 pm
Sunday, March 8, 2:00 pm

Friday, March 13, 7:00
pm

Saturday, March 14, 7:00 pm

Sunday, March 15, 2:00 pm

Dairy Arts Center, 2590 Walnut Street, Boulder. For information on times, costs, and tickets:

www.betc.org/shows

I knew from the day I understood speech what fascism is. I heard my parents, Jewish refugees from Czechoslovakia in 1939, talking about Nazism with neighbors, friends, and fellow immigrants--though usually they phrased carefully when I was present and still little. I saw my father raging when I returned from kindergarten one afternoon singing a German child’s ditty: “I will not have that language in my home.” I saw my mother cry because she didn’t know if my grandmother was dead or alive. When I could read, I learned more. I heard of an event called Kristallnacht with Jews beaten to death on the streets in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland, businesses, buildings, and synagogues crushed to rubble. I knew about life and death in the concentration camps, the hunger and sickness, the vicious experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele on living human flesh, the people lured into the gas chambers with the promise of showers. I knew that many of my relatives were likely to be among the stick thin corpses stacked like cordwood revealed as the war ended and liberating soldiers entered Auschwitz. Much later, when my daughter was still a baby in my arms, I noticed that a fellow East European woman visiting my parents couldn’t stop crooning and kissing the baby. “She reminds me of my daughter,” the woman said. I smiled and asked what her daughter was doing these days.

“They burned her.”

I read George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 in my teens and discovered there what struck me as the strongest, clearest description of fascism possible. Grand Inquisitor O’Brien is telling protagonist Winston “If you want a vision of the future imagine a boot stamping on a human face. Forever.”

We have seen what ICE agents--the president’s personal and growing gestapo--are doing to unarmed people on US streets: dragging Aliya Rahman, a disabled woman on her way to a doctor’s appointment, onto the street after breaking her car window and pulling her out. We can see this on video, and also the murder of two innocents, Renee Nicole Good by an officer to whom her last words were “I’m not mad at you,” and the warm-hearted nurse Alex Pretti as he attempted to help a woman who had fallen to the ground. They are also arresting people they believe to be immigrants without bothering to check whether they are here legally or even have full citizenship. They tear children away from their parents and toss them, with other victims, into hell hole prisons in the United States or in other countries where prisoners are in danger of dying.

I won’t bother you with the attacks on news media, laws and lawyers, education, science, art, and health care. I think it’s general knowledge that we live under a dark cloud and it’s no wonder we find ourselves distressed.

(Incidentally, it’s worth noticing that a culture that rarely expresses a profound interest in language tends to dive into all kinds of questioning and argument when a word is used in a way some political people dislike. There’s “genocide,” for instance, when utilized to define Israel’s murderous attacks on Gaza and the West Bank. “Genocide” was originally coined after World War II by Rafael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, and his description seems entirely clear to me. Not, however, to passionate Zionists who will endure nothing even remotely critical of Israel. Note that as long as these people can control much of the discourse concern about the bloodshed itself tends to fade into the background.)

****

Yes, all this is troubling. Let’s listen to the singers in the musical Hair insisting “You Can’t Stop the Beat” and dance a little.

Almost everyone I know struggles to keep from sinking into a quicksand of grief and trying to keep some fragments of joy in their lives. They do this by staying busy, stretching at sunrise, caring for each other, appreciating small miracles, and doing the best they can to challenge fascism. Many have turned to creativity and are sketching, playing instruments, writing, singing, or listening to music. We humans were bred for music. When a lone person in a crowded place--a grocery store, airport, mall, or train--pulls out a violin and starts playing you soon see others turning, stopping, smiling, edging closer to the sound. A child in a stroller starts waving his arms; his mother is swaying; an older couple comes together to dance. And now you’re remembering Shakespeare’s opinion:

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.

Poetry of course embraces both language and music so here is poet Michael Blumenthal, whose fine work I’ve previously introduced in this Substack and a recent post of his that I found speaks to what so many of us are feeling:

BEAUTY IS A MEDICINAL RESPONSE TO THE UGLY

Take, for example, the brown rabbit

on my patio this morning,

removing small bites of blackened ice

from the ground but ignoring

the carrot I threw him, until, finally,

using that forever-twitching nose of his

to locate it, he chomps eagerly down

with that manic chewing of his until all

the beauty of carrot, ice, rabbit and patio

are diminished… But, then, just in the nick

of time, I come upon a video of Indonesia’s

incredible Banggai Cardinalfish, holding

his hatched eggs in his mouth for another week

and—whoops!—now there’s a winter cardinal

at my window, the sun is finally emerging

from its wintry hideaway, and my wife,

with that beautiful face of hers, walks

into the room just in time to rescue me

from my renewed despair at this Trump-

dominated universe and all its glittery ugliness

and remind me there is still the possibility

of the beautiful emerging from the tawdry mess

we have made of this life and this planet

and now, suddenly, a fantastic whiteness

of snow, and then an adorable little mouse

emerging from the radiator, such beauty

ever and forever remaining to be found

in the singing medicine cabinet of this life.

--By Michael Blumenthal

****

Postscript: Here’s Lemkin’s definition: “By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing)…. Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group”

Kate Gleason

Kate Gleason is one of the most talented actors in the area, a performer who can delve into profound emotional depths or have an audience laughing uncontrollably. So when she says she is currently working on a play that she sees as an actor’s dream it’s wise to buy a ticket.

That play, Brooklyn Laundry, has completed a Denver run and opens at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder on the 21st of this month. The author is playwright John Patrick Shanley among whose multiple and much-admired works is Doubt: A Parable, which won four Tony Awards, a Drama Desk Award, and a Pulitzer and was eventually transformed into a film starring Meryl Streep. Brooklyn Laundry, Kate says, provides “great meaty stuff to work on. It deals with family love, loss, all those romantic themes. It teeters between a drama and a comedy and has some really funny dialogue. And yet, underneath there’s a real darkness.”

Director Allison Watrous is a Shanley fanatic who is certain to do the play justice, Kate says. Her resume is impressive and so are those of the rest of the cast: Annie Barbour, Torsten Hillhouse, and the luminous Jessica Robblee.

“All of these people are good friends,” says Kate, “and we’ve worked together. We know each other’s language.

“This has been a great safe place to create art and go to those deeply emotional places that could feel unsafe,” she adds. “It’s a joy and we don’t always get that as actors.”

Early in her acting career, Kate moved to New York and, as she says, “hit the ground running,” working on Broadway and in estimable off-Broadway venues. Almost nineteen years later she moved to Denver: “It was a dude who convinced me. He was living here, we became a couple, and commuting back and forth was not working. I think I had been done with New York, had got to an age where I was not happy there any more. I knew Denver and loved it. I wanted a different way of life. I wanted to be able to ride a horse and knew I couldn’t do that in Brooklyn.”

Denver rapidly took to her. She has worked at the Denver Center, Miners Alley, the Arvada Center, as well as BETC. There was also a pause during all this for a gig in Vienna. In addition to acting, Kate now directs in various venues and teaches at the Denver Center.

“These days I really want to do more directing as I’m aging out of certain roles, and it’s something I love,” she says. .

“I’m getting real stage fright. I don’t know if it’s mortality. Being a director--it’s nice to be on the other side of the curtain sometimes.

But middle age has its benefits: “I do believe I’m much stronger in my choices and being present on stage than in my 20s, 30s, and 40s. You need to let go of a lot of vanity to be really present and really raw. There are not as many big roles for a certain age but sometimes better parts. We are more interesting than our younger selves.”

Kate’s creative life remains intense and vital: “Living in Colorado I’ve had a chance to do a lot more work than would be given in New York,” she comments. “It is a smaller pond but there’s great work to be had here--and I’m profoundly enjoying the show I’m doing at BETC now.

“I’ve been very lucky.”

So have we.

The preview for Brooklyn Laundry shows on February 20th and opening night is the 21st. The final showing is on Thursday, March 15. www.betc.org/shows.

Dairy Arts Center, 2590 Walnut Street, Boulder.

Come in under the shadow of this red rock

And I will show you something different than either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

T.S.Eliot, The Waste Land

****

I was reading a memoirish novel by a well-known author--at least the Times said he was well-known though, alas, I’d never heard of him--when I came upon a sentence that instantly endeared him. “I am afraid of my bathroom,” he said.

He had reason for this, having once suffered a heart attack in the tub. I have been through no similar calamity, but there’s something about being naked and alone in that small, brightly lit room, stepping into the shower, and feeling the warm water run over your bare shoulders that brings up anxious thoughts and troublesome memories. Many years ago, I discovered a small lump in my breast and though I was able to ignore it when clothed and active, I couldn’t stop feeling for it again and again when in the bathroom: “Can’t find it,” I’d decide joyfully, and then, “Oh, damn. There it is.”

That was the beginning of an eventful year: a diagnosis of breast cancer, the usual treatments under the care of a thoughtful and wise doctor, and what was a deep and prolonged experience of bodily fear. Cancerland was informative. I met many patients in support groups where we could get together, share our thoughts and experiences, experiment with visualization, comfort each other when necessary, and roar with laughter at the blind stupidity of healthy people.

Since then I have been diagnosed with two blood cancers both described by the doctors as dormant, which means the primary side effect at the moment is just fatigue--time stealing and irritating to be sure, but not nearly as distressing as the effects of many other cancers.

Still, every new pustule or bruise, any perception of something that feels like a slight, unexpected swelling, a persistent cough--these things tend to send me straight down a dark, dank rabbit hole. The heart sinks in my chest and shrivels. I constantly refer to Google and seem unable to distract myself with regular daily endeavors. Stupidly, although I do visit doctors as required, I also do the best I can to avoid any medical tests, too aware of the anxieties they arouse both beforehand and when you wait for results. If something is wrong, I tell myself, I’ll report to the doctor as soon as I feel the first symptom. Stupid? Maybe. But all of us wrinklies deal with the shocks and surprises of old age differently. Some check their bodily numbers constantly and spend much of their time watching videos and reading articles about extending longevity and reaching a vibrant old age through diet, exercise, meditation, and/or some newly discovered treatment. I retreat into denial, noting also that the medical establishment seems less inclined to recommend stressful tests for people my age.

So when I noticed an excrescence at the side of a nostril a month or two ago I put it down to my usual unnecessary anxiety and all the general puckers and wrinkles of age. My doctor reacted differently. “There’s a fifty-fifty chance of cancer here,” he commented during a wellness check.

A visit to a dermatologist followed and a biopsy. The cancer was squamous, the PA said, treatable by surgery called Mohs. That will be done in a month or so.

I waited for the rabbit hole which somehow hasn’t manifested itself as much as expected--not even in the bathroom. I ask friends how they deal with fear. Some meditate, several say they turn full attention to activities, whether recreational, necessary, or as simple as washing the dishes. I keep thinking of Salad Days, that charming 1950s musical with a central cheery little song titled “Find Yourself Something to Do.” Also the advice of a one-time acting teacher who said: “If you’re feeling lost and scared onstage, pick up a prop or start sweeping the floor.” And then there is that cliche about living in the moment, a cliche that survives because it contains truth. I remember visiting a psychiatrist all those years ago before I was going for a breast cancer biopsy because I felt I had lost all equilibrium. “On the way, look at the clothes people are wearing,” he said. “Do you see lilacs peering over fences? What color is the sky?”

I still think of him and utilize his advice when anxious and then hearing Mozart, finding a message from someone I haven’t seen in ages, or having the blessed chance to smile at a toddler riding a shopping cart high in the supermarket.

Distraction is of course much more difficult for those suffering chronic pain or dealing with imminent difficult surgery.

W.H. Auden had his own thoughts on fear. Often his work is world-weary, caustic, and full of sorrowful prediction but “O Where are you Going” is different, a poetic conversation between a figure wracked by fear and a very different soul. Here are the last two stanzas:

****

“O what was that bird,” said horror to hearer,
“Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease.”

****

“Out of this house”---said rider to reader,
“Yours never will”---said farer to fearer
“They’re looking for you”---said hearer to horror,
As he left them there, as he left them there.

This is no ordinary woman in the photograph, her head slightly to the side, those clear dark eyes looking at you, the small, closed-lipped smile. She has bread in the oven, this woman, and she doesn’t want it to burn, but she is humoring the photographer and her husband, who asked for the picture. Her little boy is outside with the 12-year-old girl from next door. Perhaps she is wheeling him around in the wheelbarrow or placing a roly-poly bug in the palm of his hand. But she’s only a child herself, and the garden is full of distractions--like the raspberries clustering against the wall and the voices of neighborhood boys drifting in from the street. Just the day before, the woman found a cracked green bottle on the flagstone path—someone had tossed it over the wall. What if there’s a similar danger today? So she smiles at the photographer and accedes to his request for “Just one more,” while all the time wanting to jump off the chair and bolt back into her day.

Elisa Peretti had always been a good girl. She sat in the corner and watched and didn’t disturb the grown-ups. She kept herself tidy; she ate what she was offered. She did well at school, and she had a pleasing way of playing the piano. We realized early that there was something healing about her hands. Other children came to her with their bruises and scraped knees. She couldn’t make these hurts go away, but her touch had a way of calming pain. Or they brought her fallen nestlings, a half-crushed snake, a duckling turning crazed and damaged circles. No one could recall exactly what she’d done with these creatures, though Gina remembered a sparrow eventually being set free and a burial service for the duckling.

When Elisa reached her teens, we realized she had the power to help women in labor. Expectant mothers began sending for her—even those who chose to give birth in the shiny new hospital in the city—and she’d sit beside them, talking or remaining silent, stroking their rippling bellies. After the birth, she’d hold the baby in her arms and kiss his wet forehead before placing him on his mother’s body.

There was the time that Gina Serantoni’s boyfriend left her, and she turned into a stick. They begged her to eat, but when she put bread in her mouth you could see her jaw tighten and her throat muscles strain; she’d make choking sounds and vomit. But there was nothing to vomit, and the effort almost turned her inside out. Gina’s grief was like a fever. She wouldn’t go outside. She stayed in her room and rattled backwards and forwards until her mother thought she’d go crazy with the footsteps. Finally, someone thought to send for Elisa and there she was standing at Gina’s door, that voice of hers, smooth as cream, saying “Gina,” and the poor grieving girl jerking her splotched triangle of a face around.

No one knows what was said between them. When Gina’s mother peeked in later, she saw the two girls sitting on the floor, Elisa holding out little pieces of bread and Gina opening her mouth like a hungry bird. And swallowing. Eventually, Gina and Elisa were in the kitchen, cooking eggs and calling the boyfriend a brain-addled pig. Perhaps it was the food that brought Gina around, but we always thought it was Elisa saying her name.

There were things about Elisa we didn’t know. People sometimes saw her walking through the fields toward the woods at night, or coming out of them in the morning, disheveled and with scratches on her legs. The crickets chirred, the brown water glided over the stones in the stream bed and she smiled and said nothing. And no one understood why she married Roberto, the pasty, perpetually blinking little shopkeeper.

By then she had matured into a solid young woman. She pulled her hair back taut from her face though there was always a whisper at the hairline, hazing her forehead. You can see it in the photograph. She waited on customers or sat in the doorway of the shop watching people come and go. It was nice visiting her house—the shiny wooden floors and dark furniture, the blue curtains at the window and always the smell of something baking.

But her waist never thickened. Elisa Peretti could not get pregnant. She who had helped so many children into the world and was everybody’s favorite aunt.

She still went out at night sometimes, crossing the stream that separated the clear green fields from the woods and vanishing among the trees. They weren’t safe, those woods. There were occasional wolves. And Gilberto once heard a chuffing, panting sound at six in the morning, at the place where forest meets town, and came on three wild boar poking in garbage. He’d never seen beings so ugly and alien, he said. Their legs were long for fast running, their eyes were vicious and their tusks could root out your heart.

Looking back, people remembered a particular morning, Elisa walking slowly back into town, her hair a rich maze down her back, the smell of truffles drifting in the folds of her skirt.

You’re looking at the photograph. You think you see something? You think you know her? We thought we did too.

Elisa finally conceived at the age of thirty-three. Everyone was happy. Well, there were those who said her egg must have been old and withered, but no one listened to them. You could tell when the baby was kicking by her smile. The Holy Virgin must have smiled like this, knowing she had the entire world—sky, tree, stone and stream—inside her body. After nine months, Benjamin tumbled out, round and laughing and solid as an apple.

When he was three he caught a cold. She made him vegetable soup and fed him pieces of chicken, but he was slow to recover. For a time he’d seem better, but then the smudgy blue circles would re-appear under his eyes and he’d flop onto his chair as if there were no bones in his legs. The doctor had no diagnosis. She drove him to the big hospital in Rome and they gave her a word: neuroblastoma.

Benjamin had surgery. She told us how they took out the tumor and irradiated the gaping space in his belly. They got it all, she said. Then they closed him up and dripped chemotherapy into his veins to take care of any cancer cells that might have escaped into his blood.

It was a very hard time. She took him back and forth to the hospital for treatment. She learned to clean out the tube in his chest; she studied what foods would strengthen him. Eventually he was well enough to stuff himself with raspberries and shriek happily when they trundled him round in the wheelbarrow.

In four months, the neuroblastoma came back. Roberto began drinking. I visited once and saw Elisa leading Benjamin to the bathroom. He was hunched up, taking tiny steps, his face old with pain. And Elisa—she smelled bad. Her eyes were unfocused and she stumbled when she walked.

Gina visited. The house was stale and tumbled. Benjamin was sitting on the sofa in his yellow pajamas with a licorice candy in his hand, too sick to put it in his mouth.

Roberto told us what happened after Gina left. Elisa stood up suddenly, scooped Benjamin off the sofa and carried him upstairs, his head hanging over her shoulder. You will sleep on the sofa she said to Roberto.

Roberto tried, but he couldn’t sleep. At three in the morning he crept upstairs and creaked open the bedroom door. It took a few seconds for her form to come to him out of the darkness, the outline of her shoulder, her hip. He heard her breathing, deep and regular and he strained to hear the breathing of his son. He thought perhaps Benjamin was dead; perhaps he’d already been dead when Elisa carried him up the stairs. He stood for a long time, listening, trying to bid his son goodbye.

The window turned milky. Gray shapes pressed against it, slowly gaining definition; the full bright blues and greens of morning returned. Elisa stirred and Benjamin stirred with her.

Benjamin recovered. That was our miracle. She had taken his sickness into herself as they lay coiled on the bed. In a few days he could walk upright. His color returned. He began to eat, talk and run. And as he recovered, his mother sickened. It took her only five months to die.

Look at the woman in the photograph. The dark, unreadable eyes and the patience of her lips as she sits in her well-ordered house. She wants to see about her bread, this woman. She wants to go into the garden and find her laughing child.

Of course there was something hopeful about all the cheery Happy New Year messages that popped up on Facebook at the beginning of 2026, but this image of one of thousands of children--and also adults--killed, wounded, perhaps disabled for life or dying of cold or starvation in Gaza and on the West Bank remains. All this is caused by Israel’s war crimes--the destruction of schools, hospitals, houses of worship, and homes, the snipers aiming for children’s heads or hearts, the calculated cruelties, and none of this shows any sign of stopping, despite the millions of protesters all over the world, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, atheist or agnostic, calling for a ceasefire and insisting on the rights of Palestinians to free, safe lives.

This is hardly the only instance of people in many parts of the world suffering beyond imagination. They might face famine, intense poverty, threatening gangs, a dangerous dictatorial regime. The war between Russia and Ukraine grinds on forever and the United States has seen fit to bomb Nigeria, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Why? We hear differing reasons. But it seems to me that, hovering in the sky with planes and drones lies the intention of re-creating the US imperium, the role of the United States as world ruler.

Do you know what bombardment feels like? My earliest memory is of being two years old in London, hidden under a steel table for protection from German bombardment with a handful of adults and screaming in terror while frantically pulling out an eyelash. My schoolteachers said later that I was an exceptionally timid child, trembling visibly whenever asked a question in class.

Now consider the trauma of a ten-year-old Gazan who has lived through four Israeli wars.

Europe, which I’d always thought of wistfully as a place of reason, with countries where everyone receives health care and education and governments are less militaristic than ours. Unhappily nation after nation now appears to be turning rightwards with the encouragement and organizational help of one-time Trump adviser Steve Bannon as well as others. How is it possible, I wonder, that people living in such countries as Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, people who had suffered under both Nazism and the iron hand of Communism, contemplate sliding toward the far right? And why are so many dictators of differing stripes running nations around the world from India to Egypt to Rwanda?

It feels as if a huge, dark and terrible cloud is unfurling over everything.

Happy new year.

Of course, contemplating all this on New Year’s Eve I also thought about the damage being done to the United States by a government revealing itself more and more strongly as a death cult. The destruction takes place in several ways and on several levels, and it seems that every morning we learn of a new atrocity. The United States has attacked international organizations conceived after the shock and horror of World War Two to prevent any other such a hideous event. The entire concept of human rights and international law is being shredded. We spend billions of dollars on weapons and the military as well as on the prisons intended to hold immigrants and, it now seems, almost any people of color, along with the violent and heavily armed ICE agents sent to haul these people away without bothering to check on status, history, or background before dumping many in these wretched prisons.

Almost every political legislative decision seems to lead to less food and support for hungry American children, less access to the already broken health care system for almost everyone, less payment for workers already barely getting by on meager earnings. Programs intended to save an endangered planet on which our very lives depend, not to mention the lives of thousands of sentient beings, are chopped away. The government has placed a man with clearly unhinged ideas about healthcare, illness, and vaccinations in charge of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endangering the health of millions of Americans and causing several layoffs and resignations from that agency. Who needs experts? Science itself is under attack including research that might help fight cancer and/or generally better human life. Along with large chunks of science in progress we can bid farewell to knowledge, education and, in some places, soul-saving art and music. The government is moving to control what’s taught in universities and schools, pressuring educators of almost every discipline to teach only the empty propaganda Republicans approve of and removing any part of history these racists see as featuring people of color. Republicans are also harassing librarians and banning literally thousands of books. Genuine education has become the enemy. Along with wisdom. And--as revealed by significant mass media twists and takeovers--truth.

On the third day of the new year Trump invaded Venezuela and captured President Nicolas Maduro. Some explanations were of purported drug trafficking but for the most part Trump exulted in the nation’s oil reserves and the money that could be made by US corporations. He himself, he said, would take full control of Venezuela.

It’s impossible to predict the outcome for the nation and its people. Usually when the United States unseats a foreign leader it is because the leader’s program includes nationalizing resources for the good of their own people rather than to be plundered by American corporations. But even though Maduro succeeded Hugo Chavez, who did this, he was a corrupt and miserable president whose removal will likely be applauded by many Venezuelans although there is also serious opposition to American interference given the suffering this caused to much of Latin America in the past. Think of El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Chile. And consider Trump’s recent comments about invading Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, and Brazil. That is in addition to Greenland and Canada as well as removing the Iranian regime--something Israel has been urging for decades.

Seven days into the new year, Renee Nicole Good was murdered in Minneapolis by ICE agent Jonathan Ross who fired four bullets through her car window. She wasn’t the first to die at the hands of ICE, nor was her death more terrible than those faced by so many people who died after being snatched from their homes, off the streets, away from stores or places of work and--in many cases--dumped in hellholes in the US or overseas. I’m sure dozens of Black Americans fully understand these events.

Still, this particular murder felt like an icicle being shoved, inch by agonizing inch, into the heart. We had all taken children to school at some point, gassed up cars, attended religious services, shopped for groceries, and maneuvered out vehicles that were momentarily stuck. Now we could fully understand the intentions of the death cult and how terrifying they are. Almost immediately after Good’s death, the administration chimed in, saying the shooting was Good’s own fault because she was trying to kill Ross with her car. And besides, she was a domestic terrorist, part of a lunatic and fanatical left wing, the kind of left wing that finances and incites violence and has the temerity to oppose Trump’s policies. Vice President JD Vance soon assured the public that ICE agents are immune from prosecution no matter what crimes they commit but a serious crackdown is required for those left wingers.

All this about a woman whose last words to her killer were “That’s fine, dude, I’m not angry with you.”

Like so many others I find myself swinging from terror and despair to hope. Hope because the folks in Minneapolis are working beautifully together to protect each other. Because in other cities too there are huge, surging protests and I love the courage and creativity of many of those attending--the costumed frogs, the drumbeats, song, dance and music, the clever posters, the passion for justice. My hopes rise with every drop in the administration’s poll numbers and with every strong, forthright, and honest politician who is more interested in serving the community than garnering personal power. (Three cheers for Zohran Mamdani, AOC, and Bernie Sanders). The young ones tend to be much lauded but it isn’t fair to forget the old timers who have never stopped fighting through all their years in offce or who, perhaps having hesitated somewhat too long, have found their moral compass and raised their fists. There are also several organizations that work tirelessly for justice and democracy--and I so wish I had a few million to donate.

It’s a struggle to avoid depression sometimes and allow oneself those moments of joy--the morning cup of coffee, the birds flirting around the feeder, the wonderful moments with family or dear friends while still thinking what we should be doing is any small task we can to alleviate suffering.

Every day, one thing that circles endlessly through my mind is a poem by W. B. Yeats where the fairies invite a child to join their enchanted world. (The Victorians were big on fairies. and I sometimes wish those magical beings hadn’t vanished).

Here’s the last stanza:

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Ring-billed gull, Golden Ponds, Longmont.

Bruce Henderson has had a long, creative, and fruitful career as a journalist, a professor teaching at the University of Colorado and helping run the campus press, then becoming the communications director at the university’s Atlas Institute.

In addition to all this Bruce developed NeuroPong, a table tennis program designed to help people with such neurodegenerative conditions as multiple sclerosis and parkinson’s.

“People with these conditions, they’re much more open to relationship and other people,” Bruce says in an interview. “They care for each other. They’re open about what they can and cannot do. We work on them doing more. We try to work on things that help improve what they’re going through and they’re very grateful about that in a way that other people are not.”

The group plays table tennis twice a week for two hours.

Bruce retired from journalism several years ago and returned with increased vigor to photography--a long-time pursuit. He has shown his work in several locations from NCAR to the JCC and has sold prints in downtown Boulder.

Having regularly seen his page on Facebook I’ve found myself mesmerized by Bruce’s images of birds--stunning, fascinating, informative or simply quietly beautiful. I ask whether he has a specific interest in birds. “Yes,” he responds. “But also in life in general.”

Some years ago, Bruce converted to Judaism.

“There’s a branch of Judaism that says the light of creation is in everything and it’s up to us to find that spark,” he says.

As a photographer, Bruce says he’s close to Henri Cartier Bresson, the French photographer known as the father of street photography and originator of a much discussed concept he termed “a decisive moment.”

“For him,” says Bruce, “it’s kind of capturing an action in the middle of it: a man jumping over a puddle. He’s in the air and there’s a reflection in the water. It’s a moment frozen in time. And Bresson talks about a harmony between the photographer and the moment of action the photograph captures. In that moment I find that spark of creation when I’m taking photos.

“I’ve gone out to shoot just about every morning around sunrise or a little after when the birds are most active and the light is the best,” he continues. “The places I visit most often are St. Vrain State Park, Longmont; Golden Ponds, Longmont; Pella Crossing, Hygiene; and this time of year I now frequent Barr Lake State Park in Brighton, where eagles spend a lot of the winter. I also like Walden and Sawhill ponds in Boulder. All are within a 40-minute drive from my home.”

He returns to the idea of the moment: “I often say I live life at one two thousands of a second because it’s the shutter speed that catches the motion of birds in flight. But it also captures that frozen moment, the liminal moment between actions. To me it’s almost a spiritual moment of connection where the wings are frozen--not going up or down, somewhere in between. No action. Action is frozen. That has almost a meditative spiritual connection for me, almost like finding the hidden sparks of creation.”

Bald Eagle at Barr Lake with a setting moon backdrop this morning.

Does he have favorites among birds to capture in photographs, I ask. “Osprey and great blue herons,” he responds. “I like the way they fly. Osprey birds are of pretty complete life connection from breeding to eating to hunting to raising young.”

As for herons, the latest photo he took shows one that “has a fish in its mouth in South Boulder Creek.”

Another photo shows a ring-beaked gull that had just caught a fish along with “another gull trying to chase it down to take the fish away,” he says. “I think maybe those birds doing an action is an ‘important part of their life and if you look at all my bird photos you’ll find almost every one had a little spark glint in their eye that led to me finding that connection, that spark of creation.

“Birds in flight also have to be the most difficult thing to photograph. You have to be very practiced and anticipatory of their habits and where and how they fly. When I look into the view finder everything else in the world is cut off and I’m totally focused on what I’m looking at. You are in the present moment and there isn’t anything else.

“Where there is nothing there’s God. That’s a very Hasidic philosophy. Meditation tries to do this. In Hasidism it’s quieting the senses, making them very small or into nothing and that’s where you find something.”

Bruce’s camera connects him with humans too: “For Har HaShem’s sixtieth anniversary I photographed forty-five people and the concept that I came up with was that you have to go into their homes and find a background that has meaning to them and is interesting to look at. You can’t have just faces.

“People not only welcomed me into their homes but into their hearts and I felt connection with each of them.”

Interviewing older artists for this Substack I discovered that many retirees turn their attention to art, whether taking up drawing for the first time or returning to the violin music they played years ago as teenagers. I ask Bruce about this.

“My view of the world has changed in the last ten years, maybe fifteen,” he says. “I see the world almost like I did when I was a child with an awareness that in your working years you don’t have time to be mindful at all. You just become more aware of your surroundings and other people and how much more important everything seems. It’s a more mature kind of awareness.

“And the thing about Judaism is to have that awareness, that connection. You can’t just sit on a bench or meditate and become self-important. You have to do something. Part of the bird photography is bringing this beauty to other people and to make the world better.”

Bluejay Portrait

This kind of thing gives you a lot to think about including how you’ll be remembered after death and how you yourself remember those you loved and who have already died.

The older I get the more I find that my dead return more and more--from the mother from whom I rebelled so fiercely (a rebellion I bitterly regret now) to the acting teacher who changed my entire approach to art and theatre before wandering into the wilds of scientology himself and dying, I surmise, of a broken heart.

For some of those I’ve created a fictive mortuary as part of a novel I’m still struggling with. This is inspired by the Crypt of Capuchins in Rome that has five small chapels in which human bones are decoratively arranged as walls and ceilings. A sign at the end of a walk through the crypt reads “What you are now, so once were we. What we are now, so shall you be.”

When I was twenty my best friend Phyllis was murdered. We were both lonely and eccentric, outsiders who disliked the stifling conventionality of the university we attended and who in many ways celebrated our difference. We periodically drove fellow students crazy at parties by reciting alternative verses from Lewis Carroll’s poem about the poor pig who sat alone and wept because he was unable to jump. When Phyllis was given a car by her parents, we took long drives through the gloaming to nowhere talking nonstop. We made fudge at her house together. Acted in plays. Created our own language.

When Phyllis was murdered the headlines were lurid and there was a rumor in the student body that we two were lesbians and Phyllis deserved being attacked and beaten to death because she was a slut. That’s how stupidly parochial the University of Delaware was at the time.

I grieved the loss of Phyllis throughout my twenties and of course she never entirely left. Sometimes when I was at a party and another guest turned her head in my direction I saw Phyllis’s gray-blue eyes. And often at night her low, gravelly voice would enter my dreams as she recited lines from a favorite poem. Here’s part of one she had recited in class more than once:

The moon has lost her memory.

A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,

Her hand twists a paper rose,

That smells of dust and eau de Cologne,

She is alone

Yes, Eliot again.

Some time ago, perhaps three years, I struggled at the computer for a couple of weeks to bring Phyllis back to life in an essay describing her and our time together. I kept remembering her university theatre performance decades ago in Ionesco’s “The Lesson.” Here a demented professor bullies a bright young pupil who becomes more and more distressed as the hours together continue and who finally stabs her to death. At the ending of the play the maid welcomes in a new bright young victim.

Phyllis was an extraordinary acting talent and there was no forgetting her performance, her slow slide from her chair to the unforgiving floor as breath left her body.

Perhaps this was a warning and a prediction.

Something wonderful came of the essay however: A message from a woman wanting to know more about Phyllis and who, it turned out, was Phyllis’s niece Becky, daughter of her brother. I found out from her that Phyllis had been the source of much grief and disruption in the family. As young as I was when I met Phyllis, I didn’t begin to understand how troubled she was and how fragile. Now I was learning. But I did want to tell Becky, how extraordinarily talented and intelligent her aunt was, what a warm and caring friend she could be, and how unsuited both of us were to the repressive, stultified atmosphere of the university.

Phyllis still visits but these days her appearances are more peaceful. Perhaps because of the essay that in some sense brought her to life, and also because of the pleasure of encountering her niece, whose appearances on Facebook show a warm and caring woman surrounded by loving family members.

I have had dozens more visits from the dead, though few as painful as those of my murdered friend.

Alana, with whom my husband and I had been close friends for years, simply dropped to the floor one day while sharing the kitchen with her very young granddaughter and died of a heart attack by the time she reached the hospital. She was a terrific cook and she tends to stand at my elbow in the kitchen when I stir a soup or stew, reminding me not to leave the wooden spoon in the liquid.

There’s also Gunner, whom I think of as he prepares to slice his pork roast and visualize every time I sharpen a knife on the steel.

Wise and warm-hearted Louise, gone three years, gave me a cuddly cardigan for my birthday once. I almost always snuggle into it when I have a doctor’s appointment and am a little nervous beforehand and it helps me feel Louise’s comforting presence.

Mrs. Fayers, who taught English literature at grammar school, was both loved and hated by students. She brought us Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Keats, Wordsworth, Milton with admiration and passion but she could also be critical. And then there was her beautiful, melodious voice! I still hear her reading Portia’s speech “The quality of mercy is not strained.”

As for my mother, I could fill pages with apology for the pain my rebellion caused her and for the understanding of her sorrows I only achieved as I aged: the murder of our family in Czechoslovakia, the death of my father just as the war was ending and when she was alone to take care of two little girls as a refugee in a strange country. In particular I refused to honor her widow’s grief when I was little because of the grief I was feeling myself. I was four when my father died and I thought of him as a kind of mystical figure, the prince in a fairy story, infinitely loving and strong. He belonged to me. My mother was just a boring bossy, old figure.

Now I see how strong, competent, loving, and fierce my mother in fact was and I so much want to thank her.

I also remember all her small gestures of kindness and protection.

I was a very picky eater when I was young, a skinny and nervous child, and my mother worried about my health as I rejected food after food. I remember one summer when I was around ten we were visiting a hotel in Vienna and all I was willing to eat was the delicious crusty Kaiser Semmel rolls but nothing resembling meat, vegetables, or potatoes. So my mother, in one of those protective little tricks of caring parents, slid a lump of butter onto the cereal every morning. I’d watch it melt into gold circles and eat.

To this day, I can’t begin eating multi grain cereal for breakfast without first watching a knob of butter melting and silently thanking her.

And whenever I hear “Oh, how we danced, on the night we were wed ...” on a Facebook reel I remember that once she and my father were young and in love as they danced to this song. It brings me to tears.

I think she knows.

But I digress.

Like most teachers I would usually come to conclusions about my students early in the semester, scanning the room, listening to the students’ comments, and figuring out how that particular class was going to progress. I’m looking for talent, intellectual curiosity, perhaps some bits of refreshing eccentricity. In short, were we going to learn together or was this particular class going to bore the heck out of me?

I made fast assumptions. In my experience wealthy California sorority girls tended to be perfectly pleasant but not of particular interest since they were focused more on clothes, gossip, fashion, and boys. I don’t remember the pretty sorority girl’s name, but for this piece I’m calling her Laura. Laura’s writing was passable but I was focusing more on the boy who was deep in investigating his topic, the girl who tossed out wonderfully original metaphors.

One Thanksgiving, having prepared the usual shelter meal and arrived, we encountered a staff member just as we began to serve. Taking me aside he said he couldn’t possibly put our two beautiful turkeys out on those pretty tables. On carving he had found red blood at the bone. I didn’t know what to do. I dithered. I tried to make myself believe vegetables would suffice. I wondered if it was possible a single sad turkey remained at any nearby store to be found and grabbed. And then I saw Laura. She was marching toward the kitchen rolling up her sleeves. I followed. She approached the mutilated turkeys, swiftly and expertly finished carving, placed the pieces on pans, and shoved the pans into the two large microwave ovens. Some minutes later those pieces, still beautifully crisp and brown and entirely cooked through, were carried into the dining room triumphantly aloft to a chorus of cheers.

I absorbed a couple of truths that evening. One was that there are differing forms of intelligence and took me to Howard Gardner’s wonderful book Multiple Intelligence Theory. I had realized that not only was Laura highly competent in the kitchen but she could convince worried staff members, take control in a crisis, and also control a room full of hungry, hopeful homeless people.

Number two: I am an impatient person and judge far too often and too swiftly. People are complicated, varied and interesting. Staying open, setting your prejudices aside and paying attention opens worlds.

In brief, as lovely Laura showed me, it can be the student who teaches.

One of the most enjoyable things about cruising Facebook is that some of your friends share wonderful and contemporary poets that you’d known nothing about before. Although I’ve loved poetry all my life I never got far beyond Eliot and Auden (though I also have the ability to recite long Shakespeare monologues, especially when I’ve had a drink or two).

It has been a great pleasure to encounter Michael Blumenthal whose poetry has both depth and humor and I hope these three give pleasure to you. He has published ten books of poetry and, as you can see from the bio that follows, has an impressive writing and teaching career.

****

THE MAN WHO NEEDED NO ONE

He wanted to need no one, not

love or thirst, not even sunrise

and the sweet amulets of water

that fall from the heavens.

No, he wanted to be an island

of self-sufficiency, to sleep

with his arms around the pillow,

a jack-in-the-pulpit alone on his throne

in the damp woods, singing to himself

beneath his curled umbrella.

And this is how he lived for many years—

a solitary song, a soliloquy

spoken into the small mirror

that hung above the wash basin,

with its blue towel and basket of dead flowers.

But something remained wrong—

a dull ache whispered from below his voice

where his heart should have been, a seed

rumbled in the pit of his stomach as if to suggest

a tree that had never grown, a stone skimming

the surface of water and then sinking.

He grew old this way, never knowing

it had been need he had needed all along—

the sound of his own voice asking

for a light to see by, a match to retrieve

his heart with from the widening dark.

from AGAINST ROMANCE

(Viking-Penguin, 1987)

****

A LITERARY EDUCATION

Now that I’ve read every book available

on how to make dying easier,

or at least more pleasant, I can finally

devote myself to re-reading Anna Karenina

and The Brothers Karamazov. I can finally

lay back in my bed at night with only

a few pages of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past

and his memory-packed madeleine

before falling into the mini-death of sleep

and, remembering things past of my own,

move into the long backwards

that is now arriving at its epilogue,

even if the last book I read about dying

was called The Five Invitations. The author,

clearly a wise man, was inviting me—

inviting us—”to discover what death

can teach us about living fully,”

about as nice an invitation as one could

hope for at my advanced age, though

I thought I had already learned all

there was to know about the subject

from Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich.

But there’s always more to learn, I

tell myself, even in old age, and so

I keep on reading, for so long that it finally

puts me to sleep, from where I no longer care

about either living or dying, but am assured,

as Ivan put it, that death is finished,

a good thing to know before I am.

****

PEOPLE SHOULD LIVE ALONE

It’s good enough for the platypus

It’s good enough for the skunk

And it’s good enough for we humans

Whether we’re sober or we are drunk

It is good enough for the leopard

And good enough for the panda

It is good enough for so many

Who live both in Rome or Rwanda

It is good enough for the tiger

And good enough for the sloth

It was good enough for George Orwell

And certainly good for old Roth

It is good enough for your body

And very good for your soul

It is good enough for orangutans

And way good enough for the mole

You may never ask a koala

If living alone is pure pleasure

But then go and ask the red panda

He’ll tell you it’s truly a treasure

If you come across a black rhino

Just ask him if loneliness counts

He’ll tell you that life is more pleasant

With every young lady he mounts

We know the Tasmanian Devil

Is hungry and eats all it can

It doesn’t like sharing its supper

With either a girl or a man

The sea turtle too is a loner

And so is the wolverine too

They both know that sleeping in couples

Is not good for me, or for you

And then there’s the tough honey badger

Complete with its small anal pouch

The presence of too many others

Is certain to make him a grouch

Oh friends, take a cue from the lionfish

The sloth and the skunk and the shrew

Don’t worry ‘bout dying alonely

As even the coupled must do.

****

MOWING

If you can still cut the grass,

if you can still prop your aching body

up against the lawnmower

and push forward against the horizon

of what you have become, if you can still

smell the fresh-cut green as it flies

outward from the blades onto

the welcoming sod, and if you can

still imagine yourself, as you once were,

lying on the grass in perfect harmony

with the air, if you can still do this, if

you can keep pushing that little engine

forward until it reaches the edge of the lawn

without coming to a puttering stop,

if you can turn around and return

to where you began with still enough

fuel in the tank to consider the next time,

if you can do this, if you can still

do this, then you are alive, and every

little engine of this earth cries out

against the sky in gratitude, and in praise.

Hegymagas, Hungary

9 August 2025

****

Michael Blumenthal, formerly Director of Creative Writing at Harvard and Professor of Law at the West Virginia University College of Law, and has taught at universities throughout the world. In addition to ten books of poetry, most recently Correcting World: Poems Selected & New, 1980-2024, he has published a novel, a memoir, short stories, essays and translations from the German, French and Hungarian. He spends his time between Washington, D.C. and in the small Hungarian village of Hegymagas near Lake Balaton.

Nancy Hightower, professor, writer, New Yorker, and visual artist, finds beauty in puddles.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote this as a celebration of the new year, but I think--hope--it represents the victory of Zohran Mamdani

####

This post isn’t intended as a news report on the elections since I suspect everyone I know followed those in detail. These are semi-ancillary thoughts on where we stood politically and where we may stand now.

First and most important: What’s the best response to Democratic victories and Zohran Mamdani becoming the mayor of New York City:

Rejoice. Sing. Dance. Take courage. And, as AOC says, and Bernie along with her: Don’t be afraid.

After days of being afraid because we’ve woken every morning to the glowering, sulky, rage-filled face of a crazed and murderous dictator we can now focus on images of Mamdani, take a deep breath, of fresh air, and savor the appointed mayor’s humor, thoughtfulness, decency, and intelligence. His ascent may well be the beginning of a far more honest, empathetic, competent, and democratic era while a stifling old political world--and I’m thinking nationwide influence--cracks and dies.

But still, we need to brace ourselves and roll up our sleeves because blowback is in full force now and it’s savage.

The Democratic establishment has revealed its putrid entrails.

For decades this party has moved more and more to the right, burying its stinking snout deep in the trough of donations filled by the hyper-wealthy and no longer representing working people or worrying much about those struggling or in poverty. The result in the populace is hunger, a tottering healthcare system, young couples who can’t afford to have children, lousy public transportation, unaffordable housing, and higher education so costly that for most it’s out of reach.

The Party has also clung like limpets to a bullying and unethical foreign policy. Mamdani’s remit is confined to New York City but he speaks truth about Israel’s genocide against Gaza and clearly understands that foreign policy has an effect on life in this country and on his city.

The Democratic Party has regularly pushed aside, spread lies about, and cheated progressives. Election after election I’ve found myself voting for candidates I neither like nor respect, while enduring the comments from smug, self-important centrists who dismiss progressives as crazed children and actually believe in things like the Bernie Bros fiction widely spread during his run for the presidency by Hillary Clinton’s campaign people. (I used to have some respect for Gloria Steinem before she said Sanders supporters were motivated because he was where the boys were. Dear arrogant, wealthy, ignorant lady, thousands of us are well into old age and far beyond boy searches.)

Can the Democrats serve as a strong opposition party? Take a look at a couple of supposed Democrats: current New York mayor Eric Addams, indicted for corruption and pardoned by President Trump and Andrew Cuomo whom Trump endorsed for the NY mayoralty and was also supported by Stephen Miller. It’s impossible to stop the last line of George Orwell’s Animal Farm circling in the mind along with their images--“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

About Race and Zionism

We expected Republicans to unleash a torrent of racist insult and invective against Mamdani and of course they have. He’s a communist, a terrorist, an immigrant and a Muslim, which means electing him will cause the horror of 9-11 to repeat endlessly. Sharia law will take over the city and spread through the country, wrecking Christianity, silencing speech and destroying the US legal system and culture as well as forcing women to wear the stifling hijab.

Some Trumpists recommend denaturalizing Mamdani and deporting him.

If Republicans were even somewhat muted on the topic of prejudice during Trump’s first days in power--at least he conceded “good people on both sides” in Charlottesville rather than praising only the marching Nazis--now the evil flower of racism has burst wide open and strewn a million seeds. Many Republicans are proudly parading their filthy prejudices. So-called Young Republicans (actually in their twenties or thirties) joke about denying the Holocaust, loving Hitler, and consigning those they dislike to gas chambers; they have a defender in JD Vance. Nicholas J. Fuentes, a racist far-right influencer, is now being listened to more and more as he grows in power and visibility while talking about his disapproval of contraception, fornication, and homosexuality and the belief that women should not be allowed to vote or enter the workforce.

From what I’ve seen most of the Democratic attacks on Mamdani are just a touch milder and almost all are cloaked in the Party’s usual veneer of wisdom and we-know- better--than-you thoughtfulness: He’s too young and inexperienced, a dreamer of impossible dreams. He’s an admitted socialist--a word that implies Communism and terrifies Americans. While young voters like him, older ones generally don’t. He once supported a defund the police policy. Besides--and here comes the shared racism--he’s a Muslim and, as proved by his criticism of Israel’s war crimes, an antisemitic danger to New York’s Jewish population.

Personal Observations: Immigrants Are a Boon

Mamdani is an immigrant about to take over a city of immigrants and this is at the core of the joyousness and vitality of his campaign. Discussion on immigration in this country tends to be narrow and blind: Immigrants are good for agriculture, construction, slaughtering animals, landscaping, working in nursing homes but they’re also a burden and should be thrown out. We’re supposed to offer refuge to people in peril according to international law but we can’t afford this; we can afford only guards, walls, and prisons. It’s nice that some of us have pity for these poor, ignorant souls.

Wrong. Wrong. And wrong again. Some immigrants have skills beyond our imagining. Several have won a science Nobel for this country. Others are brilliant dancers, actors, painters, or singers who teach or perform, and some of our best literature flows from the fingers of immigrants. Without an Italian influx, the American cuisine would have remained without garlic and tasteless and the only coffee we’d known would be something like Folgers. Worst of all: No Jews no bagels.

But it goes deeper. Immigrants are in the warp and woof of our daily lives--neighbors, proprietors of the shops we like to visit, cab drivers who might share some kind of music with us or explain interesting national differences that teach you something about other parts of the world and might give you more insight into your own nation, the nurse with the kind hands and gentle voice who sees you through a health crisis, the friendly neighbors who help with kids.

Immigrants have given us Zohran Mamdani and even taught us how to pronounce his name.

Socialism is a Terrific System

The words democratic socialism still carry the whiff of communism, the horrors of the Soviet Union, China’s Cultural Revolution, and North Korea. Applied to Mamdani it’s intended as an insult. But socialism isn’t communism and I have experienced its benefits.

After World War 2 Clement Attlee head of the Labour Party (which actually lived up to its name at the time) became the English prime minister. War and bombardment had caused huge destruction but even as rebuilding went forward Attlee turned his attention to democratic socialism, nationalizing some necessary activities and--profoundly aware of poverty--creating a strong welfare system.

I was born in London in 1942 and I can tell you what it was like to grow up under socialism at this time. Food was still on the ration and fairly nasty but, as far as I knew, no one was going hungry. The government strived to provide housing despite the rubble. Transportation was decent. There were excellent schools and universities were free. The jewel in the crown was the National Health Service, which was created in 1948 and still ensures free health care for everyone.

Arts were strongly supported. My mother, a refugee from Czechoslovakia and a widow, worked morning to night at her sewing machine every day to support me and my half-sister, and we were hardly wealthy. Still, I could afford books, walk through the National Gallery taking in the work of Botticelli, El Greco, and Van Gogh without paying a penny, visit the theatre and see Laurence Olivier onstage for half a crown.

Oh, and Attlee was always opposed fascism.

Ultra-Rich People Ruin Cities (and Pretty Much Everything Else)

One of the criticisms of Mamdani as mayor is that his plan to increase the taxes of the hyper-wealthy to help working people will anger the financial and corporate world so much that these folk will never support him and may decide to leave the city altogether.

I’m no expert on money so I can’t predict the result of an exodus but I do understand the joys of the city, and I know what happens after a stampede of millionaires, heads of international businesses and oligarchs takes over the streets where there were once family businesses, homes, small eateries. They buy up city blocks. They buy up the small delightful green areas that pop up around gray corners and fence them off. The prices of everything go up. No theatre or opera for you, no concerts, no up-scale restaurant--even a little bit upscale--where you can take out-of-state friends. Where the city once throbbed with artists--painters working in lofts, the back rooms, homes, churches where theatre was created, writers sweating in grubby rooms to get out a few pages between jobs. New York is no longer a place creatives can afford.

And the intruders tend to be boring. The ones I’ve encountered--and I have known the occasional exception--tend to be conceited, self-involved, and oblivious to the world around them. They think about clothes, lipstick, cars, make-up, their several homes. They visit a hairdresser every week. A recent New York Times mentioned a feud over a new editor of Vogue and a disputed cover. I don’t remember the details of the article but who but the most spoiled and trivial among us would care about a Vogue cover?

Back to England: The word for someone upper class is “toff.” I’ve never discovered the origin but I’m pretty sure it’s short for “toffee nose”--that is, a weakling any working class East Ender could take down. Wealth and class weren’t particularly admired in that place and time. Anyone who’s watched the Seven Up film sequence may remember young Tony, who screwed up his face for a satirical grimace imitating what he’d expect of a toff. And then there was Symon, a quiet, Black teenager. What did he think of the upper classes, he was asked.

A brief, thoughtful pause, and then “Not much.”

Vaclav Havel, the playwright who became president of Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution, a man so kindly and unassuming that I clearly remember an article—perhaps in the New York Times—in which the writer wondered at his mismatched socks.

I’m still pondering the brilliant and beautiful No Kings demonstrations that took place recently all over the country--in small towns, sparsely populated rural areas, and huge cities--and I’m still marveling at the determination of the protesters, their varied approaches and wondrous creativity. We saw a naked bike ride that shocked prim-lipped Republicans who apparently have no quarrel with the impoverishment of children and families, torturing prisoners, and killing people who may or may not be illegal immigrants. At the protests there has been dancing, singing, drumming, speechifying, chanting and--oh yes--those frogs.

Humor and laughter can be powerful tools to toss into the grim murderous face of fascism. It warms the cockles of the heart to see those plastic dinosaurs, the guy delivering food who so deftly rides his bike and swoops an escape from a group of breathlessly running agents; the eloquent Black guy who fearlessly escapes attack with a powerful, profound and funny lecture; the kids dancing on the street and the few ICE watchers trying not to smile at them beneath their masks. Hey. some of these people are human.

It does take courage to protest. Numerous videos and news reports have revealed the behavior of masked and cowardly ICE goons as they utilize guns, tear gas, flashbangs, and pepper balls or throw people they deem suspects--without a shred of evidence--to the ground, choke and beat the prone bodies or toss them into unmarked vans to be held for unspecified lengths of time or entirely disappeared. These activities take three or four of these brave masked lads, even when the victims are teenagers or wrinkled oldsters.

I know I’ve several times mentioned a comment from a Black Panther I knew decades ago in San Diego. Walter’s partner had been shot and killed in the street by a cop and he had come to our commune to communicate what he’d seen and try to recover his equilibrium. How long can horrors like this go on someone asked him. “Till the people rise up like a storm,” Walter said.

Was this massive No Kings event with its millions of people of every age and from every walk of life surging onto the streets all over the country with their defiance and demands a sign of this triumphant storm?

The inimitable Robert Reich, despite his general concern and misgiving about the current attacks on democracy, clearly thinks it is, and he has released a column titled: “Trump Has Awakened America’s Sleeping Giant.”

Here is the YouTube version and it’s well worth a listen:

I have spent endless amounts of time following the opinions of experts debating this very question on podcasts, Substacks, television, and in print. Almost all seem to come in at differing angles: Yes, No Kings was a powerful indicator and will continue to have power. Or No, street protests are theatrical but have no real political significance. And there’s the required Republican somewhat disillusioned with his/her party and generally wishy-washy who appears on almost every television news show to blither about common sense and recommend that infuriating political center the Democratic establishment--along with the New York Times--is always promoting to those running for office. (I’m not talking about The Lincoln Project members, who tend to be well-informed.) I watched one such blitherer the other evening and he was saying there are too many varied opinions and organizations involved in the protests, and protesters need to come up with a powerful single message everyone agrees on. And then he added the phrase I knew had to be coming. It was a bad idea, he said, to hold up a poster mentioning Gaza because this is an irrelevant issue and Americans have a much more important issue to fight: the swift slippage of our democracy.

Well of course that’s crucial. But genocide must always be exposed and fought wherever it occurs. The poll numbers seem to agree. They are shifting and more and more Americans support Palestinian rights. Besides, this ignorant man seems to have no understanding of the way foreign policy affects our government and our lives. This is particularly true of Israel’s vicious attacks on the United Nations, international law, and the fight for human rights--actions that are inspiring dictators worldwide, including Donald Trump. Operating through Zionist organizations in the United States Israel is having a powerful effect on voting with millions of dollars poured into political races and attacks on any politician who criticizes Israel. The same organizations’ promotion of a shaky definition of the word “antisemitic” is affecting free speech, with the word being used as a cudgel to attack universities, law firms, media outlets, businesses. Two presidents in turn have seized that cudgel to repress student protests and dictate what professors and teachers are allowed to say in classrooms.

To me the Republican with his milky comments was using the usual rubric and thinking almost entirely in terms of conventional propaganda: Get everyone repeating the same powerful message and support Democrats who embrace the meaningless middle that attacks progressives of any kind largely because those Democratic leaders’ bread and butter comes from the corporate, billionaire and techno bro world.

I’m sure there are differences among organizers and marchers. I know every single one of us tends to focus primarily on issues that directly affect our own lives. Perhaps a cancer sufferer is most worried about healthcare; the environmentalist’s primary fear is the death of our planet; farmers’ worries differ from those of teachers; parents unable to feed their children spend almost all their hours worrying about their pathetically low salaries or lost jobs. But I don’t believe for a moment that we are all narrow one-topic thinkers unaware that our lives and needs are interwoven. Teachers worry about racism because of what they sometimes see in the classroom and cancer patients fear a poisoned environment. If farmers lose their livelihoods what will happen to the price of food? Doesn’t the ACLU take on all kinds of legal cases and are the organizers of Jewish Voice for Peace unconcerned about homeless and displaced fellow Americans?

What I saw of those protesters were hordes of people turning their faces toward truth, compassion, and understanding like sunflowers facing a rising sun. And though I know there may be a quarrel or a difference of opinion here and there, when push comes to shove we are all speaking as one: We understand the terrible events of World War II. We know the world cannot and should not endure fascism again. And yes, we are rising.

I don’t think anyone--even the experts--can predict the outcome of this storm. Every time I wonder about it, all kinds of images and memories of uprisings slide through my brain. I’m remembering the photo of a slender young man standing in front of an advancing tank in China’s Tiananmen Square during the 1989 protests, a powerful symbol of courage. No one knows, however, if he survived the bloody government crackdown that crushed the revolt. In 2011 massive protests in Egypt led to the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi. But Morsi’s tenure lasted only a year when a coup was staged by Minister of Defense Abdel Fattah el Sisi, who is now president and imposing draconian rule. Other protests to consider: the upheavals of the Arab Spring which seemed to have some initial success that in most cases faded; the 1917 Russian revolution that brought Communist repression to much of Eastern Europe; the guillotines of the French revolution before that ... Sometimes it seems repression always wins if not immediately then eventually.

But it doesn’t. If all this is somewhat depressing you might turn attention to the welcome break-up of the Soviet Union, in large part due to the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev who commented that Russian control of Eastern countries would “crumble like a dry saltine cracker in just a few months.” It did. Peaceful revolutions arose in 1989 in Poland and Czechoslovakia, along with the fall of the Berlin wall. Perhaps the most inspiring event was Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution.

I visited Prague soon after this when there was still rejoicing and big black letters marched across an old city wall I passed daily: Havel na Hrad. This translates as Vaclav Havel to the castle, a motto that appeared on thousands of signs held aloft by seething crowds during the rebellion. Havel, who died in 2011, was a dissident and organizer, a thoughtful, unassuming man who had spent time in prison and was also a talented writer of plays, essays, and memoirs. The arts played a large role in the Velvet Revolution, and Havel did indeed become president until 1992 when Czechoslovakia was partitioned into two countries.

There’s a lot to worry about in America and little to consider “velvet.” The blood freezes in the veins when we remember President Trump’s comments about kneecapping protesters during his first presidency or hear him now describing Democrats, organizers and everyone he disagrees with as dangerous terrorists requiring merciless attack.

What happens to those dancing No Kings frogs as his military fervor grows?

But America is not China, Egypt, or Iran, and the vitality of the No Kings protests underlines the country’s creativity, joviality, passion, and courage--and also American independence. While I cogitate on the role of the arts in a repressive world, singers and dancers keep performing; local theatres mount plays; wonderful paintings--famous or unknown--pop up to be shared on Facebook, along with poems. We are a huge country, far from entirely homogeneous and should surely be harder to control than smaller nations which usually function under central power. Here we have many differing landscapes and cultures, along with fifty states each of which has its own power structure: governors, and legislators, city mayors, town councils, attorneys, school boards, county commissioners, and some of these folks are smart, diligent defenders. On the same evening I fumed at the wishy-washy one-time Republican, I saw several Democratic politicians and contenders on the screen and though--like so many--I’ve complained endlessly about the Democratic Party being too passive, too without vision and fire, too mired in the past it’s unfair to ignore the genuine firebrands in their midst: Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad, Ro Khanna, Maxine Waters, and of course the independent and indefatigable Bernie Sanders. In addition I often see a senator or congressperson I’d never known before speaking clear truth or find a strong, lively principled candidate running for office and likely to win. (Fingers crossed for Zohran Mamdani this evening.)

Walter is long gone. But I think if he were here he’d sense and appreciate the great storm he once prophesied inexorably rising.

This pithy piece of wisdom was taught to me when I was in my teens by a French boyfriend who had a missing hand courtesy of the child-enticing bomblets left by the Nazis as they retreated from Paris in defeat. As you probably know it means “The more things change, the more they remain the same” and I can’t think of a better description of the current supposed ceasefire and vaguely proposed peace. Yes, it was a delight to see Palestinians dancing with relief and joy as the bombing stopped, prisoners stumbling into daylight from the torments of Israeli jails and Israeli hostages moving joyfully into the arms of their parents, sisters, and friends. But so much of the agreement was vague and the people supposedly planning postwar governance had never shown the slightest interest in peace and justice. How could the nations that committed genocide be allowed to decide the future of its victims? How could insanely greedy plutocrats be allowed to wallow in the trough of aftermath profit? The word negotiation implies that leaders on all sides of a conflict sit down together but the Palestinians who have suffered so terribly are simply muzzled.

Surely you remember that every ceasefire brokered so far has been broken by Israel whose multi-million propaganda mill spews out the same story every time: “Hamas refused to accept the agreement and backed out. It was Hamas that returned to violence. Israel has not imposed starvation it is Hamas that is stealing the food.” So in the current US media you get information every day about a number of Palestinian deaths and the cut off of aid. This is followed usually by a thoughtful article on whether the ceasefire can hold while all the while you’re thinking hasn’t it been broken already? Oh, right, President Trump and Steve Witkoff are stepping in to pressure Netanyahu so that’s okay.

Plus ca change …

####

This article that follows was posted in January and re-reading I see that most of it still stands—and certainly proves the saying I learned from Henri. So it seemed worth re-posting.

What Can We Expect of the Ceasefire?

How are we supposed to understand a ceasefire that's been put together by three liars?

Here's Joe Biden, amid the rejoicing and cries of victory, pointing out that the terms of this ceasefire are almost identical to those he proposed in May, which means he should get the credit. Biden, who kept saying a ceasefire was imminent even while he had to know it wasn't, and every time blamed Hamas when the venture failed, even when Hamas had signed off on a proposal and it was Netanyahu who hadn't. President Biden, who could have stopped the slaughter with a single phone call saying the United States would no longer provide Israel with weapons and political support. Not to mention cutting aid to UNRWA, the agency most able to provide for a wounded, deprived, homeless, shell shocked and starving people and to bring in not only medicine and food, but education, comfort, and therapy to scores of maimed and damaged children.

President Donald Trump takes chest-thumping credit too and--if anything of this ceasefire holds--he to some extent deserves it. His envoy, Steve Witkoff, got more concessions out of Benjamin Netanyahu in a single visit than Biden managed in over a year. And it is clearly Trump's ascendance to the presidency that puts pressure on Israel. What is his motive? It certainly isn't compassion for suffering Palestinians. He has promised that if Israeli hostages are not released "all hell will break out in the Middle East." His pick for secretary of State is Marco Rubio, who opposes a ceasefire and wants Israel to destroy "every element of Hamas"--a goal that Israel touts too, but is for the most part unachievable--not to mention highly unlikely to bring the opponent to a negotiating table. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, slayer of university presidents, has been appointed ambassador to the United Nations, which she calls a “cesspool of antisemitism" for criticizing Israel's war crimes. The ambassador to Israel is Mike Huckabee who has said there is no West Bank and no such thing as a Palestinian.

Still, Trump did share a video recently of highly respected economist Jeffrey Sachs naming Netanyahu "a deep, dark son of a bitch" who manipulates the US government and is creating endless Middle East wars.

So why does Trump insist on a ceasefire? Some experts suggest he doesn't want to have to handle so many foreign wars at once on coming to office. Also, there's prestige. He's been known to express a desire for a Nobel Peace Prize and perhaps this significant diplomatic victory would snare one--as well as proving beyond doubt that he's a far stronger presidential figure than his vacillating predecessor. Trump also wants to expand the Abraham Accords, bilateral agreements that are intended to increase peace in the Middle East. We know that son-in-law Jared Kushner is not an actual appointment in the coming administration, but we also know he'll appear on the scene to pal with Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman and ponder the economic value of the Gazan waterfront once the Palestinians are removed.

Israel has a long history of lying--you've heard of hasbara, the nation's propaganda machine--and Benjamin Netanyahu is a champ at lying. But he also relies on the credulity of the United States government. If you saw his presentation to Congress in 2015 when he opposed President Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran you'll understand the sheer chutzpah of a foreign leader flying into another country, addressing a ruling body, and insulting the president by attempting to destroy a crucial foreign policy agreement. (He didn't manage to kill the deal right away, but with the help of Republicans he--as Israel almost always does--won the argument.) It's easy to see Netanyahu's crude approach, his use of repetition, meaningless phrases, and facts unverified by proof but, given the support of those evangelicals who look forward to Armageddon occurring in the Middle East and lofting them to heaven while sending Jews to the flames; the dumb pusillanimity of politicians along with the fact that so many of them are owned by AIPAC, his bluster works. You could predict every argument he used to justify Israel's bombardment of homes, streets, universities, hospitals, schools, the murder of doctors, aid workers, journalists, and children: Netanyahu would explain that every shattered edifice sheltered Hamas, whose fighters were using them as human shields; every apparent civilian is guilty because Palestinians voted for Hamas; children and babies have to die because they would grow up to be terrorists; it is necessary to take the lives of a couple of hundred civilians to kill a single Hamas operative and ensure Israel's safety; Palestinians were not dying of starvation because Israel was blocking the entry of aid trucks but because Hamas was stealing the supplies.

Besides, how can anyone criticize a populace decimated some seventy years ago by the Holocaust? If you do you are clearly a terrorist or an antisemite. Doubtless both.

What about the ceasefire?

I admit to a bright spurt of unadulterated joy when I first heard the word ceasefire. And even the tiniest twinge of respect for President-elect Trump because, after what seemed endless horror heaped upon horror, horror beyond words, endless loss, violence and suffering, unstoppable cruelty, he stepped in and made it all stop. On the computer, I have seen Israelis welcoming their three beloved hostages; Palestinian prisoners who had been held for years without charges limping to freedom. Palestinians dancing in the streets. Weeping with relief and hope and moving continually between unalloyed happiness and terrible grief for what has been lost, as well as a fair amount of uncertainty and doubt. At that moment, I didn't care why Trump stepped in and saw him--fleetingly--as the hero he'd always seen himself to be.

Of course this ceasefire is in three parts, all the tenets aren't entirely clear, and the text raises questions. How long will it take Hamas to discover and gather the remaining hostages? What further prisoners will Israel release in exchange? Will Marwan Barghouti, often referred to as the Nelson Mandela of Palestine be among them as both Qatar and Egypt are urging? He's not among those currently released. How can aid be continued if Israel carries out its new laws to completely shut down UNRWA? Some troops are being withdrawn and some remain. Could involuntary violence break out? The ceasefire allows displaced Palestinians to return to the north of Gaza, but their homes there are reduced to rubble. How do they survive? What happens if the war does end and reconstruction is required? Who pays? Who governs Gaza? Israel is adamant that Hamas should have no role in any government, and Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, is despised among Palestinians. There's talk about a two-state solution, but Israel still wants to annex the West Bank and in that case how will the government deal with over seven hundred thousand settlers there, many violent and armed?

Soon after writing this I turned to the Guardian for an update and discovered that Netanyahu is telling his nation that both Biden and Trump are saying they will support Israel if Israel needs to return to war and that the first phase of the ceasefire is temporary. On his Facebook page, Ayman Mohyeldin posted that finance minister Bezalel Smotrich says he's been promised by Netanyahu that Gaza will be kept uninhabitable and then taken over by Israel.

And there went that tiny flicker of hope.

Told you they were liars.

Seabird

Susan:

I dreamed last night that we were going to see her. We were going up that little, curvy street in that swank subdivision where those people live that had her. There’s all these shiny cars there, parked kind of crooked because of the way the curbs are. It’s one of them hot, blue, swimmy days where everything looks flat, like in a postcard, and all the hedges and fences and bigwheel bikes look like some kid went and outlined them in pencil. I can hear kids playing. I’m nervous, but I know I gotta get by that dragon lady to see her, that so-called foster mother that thinks I’m dirt and don’t seem to want to let me have my child—not even for them few little hours I’m entitled.

I just wanted to see her so bad in that dream. See her and muss up her curls. Buttercup curls I called them, when I still had her, they were so shiny and yellow. I wanted to see her face go bright like it could sometimes and hear her yelling, “Mommy, mommy,” and start jumping up and down at the end of the path the way she used to. Not lately, but the way she did.

Only I was nervous in the dream as well, because I was thinking something had happened to her. I didn’t know what exactly. That part of my thinking was blurry. But something. Something bad.

Anyway, there I was walking in the gate—and there she was. I didn’t see no dragon lady hanging around, just her. My little Cora Lee. And just like I had seen it in my head, she was jumping around and yelling fit to bust, and she was holding out her arms. “Here I am,” she yells. “Here, mommy. Here, mommy.” And I just kinda run down that path and I pick her up and her cheek’s hot and warm and sticking to mine, and I’m thinking she’s been pigging out on candy again, only at the same time I’m laughing. I can’t stop laughing. I’m crying too, like some kind of insane person, and all the time she’s saying, “What, mommy? Why are you laughing, mommy?” and then I woke up.

Jenny:

Well, Karen, my cunning little sweetheart, here I am in the Colorado Women’s Correctional Facility. Wonder what they’re going to correct. You know, I never seriously believed that anything like this could happen to me. Prison was something that happened to other people—people who’d done a lot more than deal a little coke. In the circles where I grew up, when anyone got into trouble, their dad had a quiet chat with someone and it was over. But not me. Me, they’re going to make an example of. That judge just sits there and says, “Two years,” as if he’s ordering a cup of coffee. Two years! How can he do that. How can that pompous arrogant old man just take away two years of my life?

I’m not saying that to make you feel bad, Karen. I’m glad they thought I was the leader because of my background (just shows what a good education can get you!), and gave you probation. I don’t mind serving the time for both of us, as long as I know you’ll be there for me if it gets hard. You will, won’t you baby?

It’s weird when you first come in here. They scrub you down, and pour lice killer over you and check your urine and examine all your bodily cavities. None of this is done by doctors. It’s done by a hick who’d be more at home working over cows, and it hurts. Then they put you in isolation for up to a week. They only gave me three days because they’re getting so many new inmates, and they need the space. Also, I’m not violent and nobody’s threatening me. There are a lot of threats against this woman who came in a bit before I did. Perhaps you read about her? Her name’s Susan Perett, and she and her boyfriend supposedly beat her three-year-old daughter to death. I haven’t seen her yet.

The first day I got out of ice, as they call it, I was surrounded in the hallway by six or seven black women. One of them starting making remarks about how my rich daddy couldn’t keep me out of the pen. “Would you say that’s nappy, Melody, or just some piss-poor perm? said another, stabbing a finger at my head. Do you remember when your friend Sheila was explaining to us what happens in prisons, and how to get by inside? I did exactly what she said: I told them I wasn’t looking for any special privileges and my hair was naturally curly. Then I walked away very coolly and steadily, despite the way my legs were shaking. Later, one of the women—Bobbi, I think her name is—slipped up behind me in the cafeteria line and whispered, “Don’t you pay them no mind. The ignorant bitches is just testing you.” My first prison friend?

Looking forward to hearing from you, Karen.
Love, Jenny

Susan:

These people in here, they treat me like I was dirt. I heard there was people saying they would kill me even before I got here. Now I can see their nasty closed faces and the way their eyes keep kind of slipping away from me. They’re thinking I’m dirt, and they don’t even know nothing about it.

In the first place, it wasn’t me that done it. I would think they might bother to ask before they go passing judgment. I loved my little girl, my Cora Lee, just like they love their little ones, and it wasn’t my fault that Jimmy would keep hitting her. There’s no way to stop Jimmy once he’s got his mind set on something. I couldn’t stop him. I couldn’t do nothing. He’s just big and mean and real quick, and I know better than to tangle with someone as big as that. And besides, I can’t stand no kind of pain. I just can’t.

Jenny:

I finally saw the alleged babykiller when she got out of ice. She doesn’t look the way I expected her to look at all. In the newspaper photographs and on television she looked kind of pretty, but from the glimpse I got she’s not pretty at all. She’s small and blond and her face is OK—or it would be except she’s got a lot of pimples. But she has this funny, slouchy walk, and she stays close to the walls, moving like a half-crushed bug. I peeked through the window when she was talking to a counselor. She was all hunched over, picking at her face.

Well, we’re being summoned. “Dinner, ladies,” at about a million decibels over the intercom. Ladies! What are you having for dinner, Karen? Have a steak for me. I miss you.

Love, Jenny

Susan:

Perhaps I wasn’t cut out to be no mother. I was sick the whole time I was pregnant—not just in the morning like people tell you, but all day long and all night as well. Sick as a dog. And I couldn’t stand to have no one touch me. Every time Ryan would lay a hand on me or even look like he was about to, I’d shrink away. Couldn’t seem to stop myself. And that’s how I lost him in the end. Because of her. Not right away but later, after she was born and screaming all the time.

Giving birth was a mess. It went on and on and on and they finally had to cut me open to get her out. And once I had her home, she didn’t do nothing but cry. I was hurting, and she would screw up her face and go all red and look at me out of little slitted-up eyes with this black hate. She knew there was no way I could figure out what it was she wanted, why she wouldn’t stop crying, but she just went on and on. I’d change her diaper and offer her a bottle or pacifier, I’d jiggle the side of the crib, I even tried singing a nursery rhyme one time, but she’d just howl and howl and howl. If I hit her or shook her a bit, she’d howl more. But I wasn’t going to let her get the better of me. I wasn’t about to let her break me.

There was this one time when I had the flu and my nose was dripping and my head pounding something awful. I lay down, and took some pills, and I’d finally gone off to sleep, when there she was, starting in again. I dragged myself up and went into her room and instead of laying there flat like I’d expected, she had pulled herself up by the bars of her crib. She was just hanging on the side and yelling. The light in the room was all gray, and with me so tired and sick and my head throbbing and not expecting to see her standing up like that—well, she looked just like a little demon.

And that kid did have a mean streak, never mind what anybody said. You take the way she’d act when me and Jimmy came to the dragon lady’s house for our visits, after they’d put her in foster care. Them visits was court-ordered, and the dragon lady didn’t like them one bit, but she knew she had to go along with them. Cora Lee would try and hide when she saw us coming. She’d dive under the table. Or grab onto the dragon lady’s legs and hold on and shriek. When we was all walking away from the house, Cora Lee would still be pulling away from my hand and screaming her head off. Jimmy and me let her know later what we thought about that kind of behavior—her embarrassing us like that in front of the dragon lady and the whole fancy neighborhood.

Jenny:

You know what I think about all the time, Karen? Besides you, of course. Fruit. I swear. I have fantasies about being at the supermarket just selecting a plum and running my fingers over the smooth, blue-black skin, or feeling the weight of an orange in my palm or sinking my teeth into the white flesh of an apple. Crazy, huh?

You’re in my mind too, of course. I like imagining you waking up in our bed all warm and rumpled the way you are in the morning, yawning, half sitting up and then diving back under the covers, snaking your arms round the pillow, snuggling your face in and defying the world to make you get up. Do you imagine sometimes that pillow is me? I wish it was.

Other than missing you, this place isn’t as bad as I was afraid it would be. The warden, John Griffin, is a big, old redneck—his neck actually is deep red; now and then you can glimpse the line of white under his collar—and he has a lot of strange ideas. He thinks he can reform us by treating us well. He’s the one that insists the guards call us ladies (“girls” is a sexist term, he explained to me once, and “woman” is a euphemism for prostitute), and he’s generous with furloughs and lets us have little luxuries like popcorn and movies on Saturday nights. One of the women just got here from a federal penitentiary, and she almost wet her pants laughing when she heard the voice over the intercom asking about popcorn orders. She went around for about an hour saying, “Popcorn orders, ladies. Popcorn orders,” and giggling like an idiot.

Dad—that’s what a lot of the women here call him—has a temper, too. They’ve got me doing clerical work, and my desk is right outside his office. He always greets me politely, but once in a while I’ll hear him get mad at someone and roar loud enough to shake the place’s concrete foundations.

Dad did something strange yesterday. There are a few women here who came from a prison in New Mexico that was overcrowded. Most of them are just doing time for drugs, but they’re all serving huge sentences: fifty years, even a hundred and fifty, because New Mexico’s got a weird sentencing system. In Colorado, you don’t usually get that kind of time for murder.

Anyway, those gargantuan sentences have made them pretty wild, especially the one they call Seabird. Her real name’s Cipri, and she’s dark and tall and looks like some kind of beautiful witch in a child’s fairy tale. Her sentence is a hundred and fifty years. Can you imagine, Karen? While she was still in ice, we were hearing about her from the staff. They said she was half crazy with the weight of that sentence. They said she’d attacked another prisoner in a county jail on her way over here because she thought the woman was making faces at her. She’d just flown across the room and wrapped her hands round the other woman’s throat, and it took three guards to pull her off.

I was working in the office on Seabird’s first day out of ice, and I saw her walk past on her way to see Dad. Her lips were all pinched in and her skin looked grayish, but she was still beautiful enough for the movies.

Seabird goes into Dad’s office. I hear him talking and nothing from her, and after a few minutes I hear him say, “Honey, I think you need a walk.”

“Oh, sure,” she says.

The next thing I know, he’s walked past my desk and is signaling to the guard in the control room. The guy looks puzzled and hesitates, but then the front doors start sliding open, and Seabird is walking toward them. She’s looking back and forth from Dad to the light coming through the door, just waiting for the trap to spring. Nobody says anything. She walks through the door.

Then she’s standing on the gravel path waiting every minute—I can feel what she’s feeling in my bones—for someone to come and grab her, and she stops at the outside gate and turns back with an I-knew-this-was-some-kind-of-joke expression, and very, very slowly, that gate begins grinding open too.

Seabird walks out into the sun. And keeps on walking till she’s out of sight.

Dad’s got to be a little worried, but he turns and heads for his office. “Why did you let her go?” I say to his back.

He swings around. I don’t think he realized I had watched the whole thing, and for a moment I don’t know if he’s going to roar at me or answer. Then he says, “She needed a breath,” goes into his office and closes the door.

I’m working on some figures an hour later when Seabird buzzes control and walks back in as if nothing had happened.

I spent all evening wondering, Karen, about his motives. Did he do it out of pity or was it calculation, a way to cool her out and prevent trouble? He knows these New Mexico women have nothing to lose and could really disrupt things if they wanted to, and I think he’d spotted that Seabird was the leader. Whatever his reasons, I saw her face when she came back in and it was completely different. Gentle, almost, and her eyes were quiet.

Susan:

Jimmy was always on me. He said I didn’t know nothing about being a mother and it was my fault she was so ornery and such a little demon. Jimmy set out to make her mind. He said it was shameful for a kid of three to still be wetting her bed and he set up a rule that she couldn’t drink anything after twelve noon, no matter how much she whined she was thirsty. But she still wet. And we’d have to punish her. I don’t know who tipped off that social worker lady, but someone did because there she was on my doorstep, poking her long nose into my business.

Well, then we had to take the kid to the basement to discipline her, and close the windows, but it wasn’t no use. Somehow that lady found out anyway and there was a whole lot of hassle and court room stuff and then they took Cora Lee away and said I could only get her back when I’d shown I knew how to be a mother. Things went on for quite a while with her at the dragon lady’s house, and me and Jimmy only seeing her every other weekend, and he kept saying they had no right to take my child away and tell me how to take care of her, and he was right. So we showed them. One weekend we picked her up and we just didn’t bother taking her back. We started traveling together, the three of us, staying at various motels nights. But it kept being the same story. She went right on wetting the bed at night, and she was real quiet most of the rest of the time, but I’d catch her looking at me or Jimmy once in a while, just mean-like, out of the corners of her eyes, and I’d know she was wishing she could be with the dragon lady and not us. If we asked what she was thinking, it’d be all crocodile tears and cowering and whining. Just once in a while, things would be different, especially if Jimmy was out of the place, and me and Cora Lee would kiss and cuddle a bit. I don’t want to think about that.

Jenny:

You’re on my mind all the time, Karen. I guess I’m not really sorry you steered me away from my comfortable life and all those safe little college boys. I keep remembering the first time I saw you, walking along Colfax with your friends. Your hair was standing away from your head like gold wire—I could swear it was giving off sparks, as if someone had run an electric current through you. With those dangling earrings and that glimmering metallic top, you seemed to shake the whole street into life as you moved. Everything, including my breathing, sped up a notch or two, and suddenly my entire life before you seemed unendurably slow.

Oh, well, if you’re not going to write, Karen, at least send some food, peanut butter or canned soup, or maybe a money order. You know what we had for dinner last night? Fried potatoes and macaroni with big lumps of cheese in it. I don’t know what they do to the cheese here, but it’s orangey-yellow and just won’t melt. Sits in big lumps on the macaroni, and later in big lumps on top of your stomach. There was also white bread and red Jello and chocolate cake. All the milk we could drink. I’m not kidding, the food here’s nothing but starch and stodge. Three months of it, and I’m completely clogged up.

Here’s the weirdest news. I talked to Susan Perett yesterday. She came and sat next to me at dinner and for some reason I didn’t just pick up my plate and walk away. I know I shouldn’t, but I actually feel sorry for her. Every time I see her, she’s sitting alone, staring into space. Sometimes she plays with Babes, the fat little dog Dad lets us keep in here. She’s very gentle with Babes, even steals food for her from the kitchen, and watching her hands when she fondles the dog, it’s so hard to imagine her doing what she’s supposed to have done to that child.

Anyway, she starts talking to me in her soft little voice, about how she wishes people would give her a chance. Nobody ever asks me what happened, she keeps saying. I wish they would ask me. Because I didn’t do it. I couldn’t do nothing like that. He was the one that done it. She goes on and on in this defeated monotone: I loved my little girl. I wouldn’t hurt her. Look. And she pulls out a photograph.

In this photograph, she’s sitting on the couch reading a magazine. There’s a little blond girl sprawled over her lap, feet up on the arm of the couch, fast asleep. Susan’s left arm is resting on the kid’s chest, one hand curved lightly over her shoulder. Karen, that child’s face is so peaceful.

Don’t laugh at me and say I’m too trusting ever to survive out on the street. Just tell me, do you think it’s remotely possible that Susan Perett is telling the truth?
Susan:

I dreamed I was on a farm somewhere, which is funny because I was only on one once, and I was watching this fat old lady pig give birth to a bunch of squealing little piglets. In my dream, I knew there was something you were supposed to do when a pig gives birth. Someone once had told me that. You’re supposed to tie up the cord or put the baby pig on the mother’s tit or something, but I just couldn’t remember what. I was standing there, trying and trying to remember, and I looked down at the ground and this one little piglet was shrinking. It was shriveling right in front of me and getting tiny and black and dried out and I knew I could save it and plump it back up again if only I could remember what I was supposed to do.
Jenny:

I don’t understand why I’m not hearing from you. Someone yesterday—a new inmate—claims she knows you, and you told her being gay was just a phase for you. Her name’s Kim. Do you know her? She says you’re going around with Josh now. Is that true? She seems kind of nutty, so I don’t necessarily believe her. But it would help so much if you’d tell me the truth one way or the other. If you’re done with me, I’ll cope somehow. I will. But you’re pretty much all I’ve got now, with my parents being so angry with me, and it’s crazy-making in here—all the daily pettiness and boredom, never being able to decide for myself what I want to eat, or when to go to bed; never going outside on my own. I’m never properly alone, and at the same time, I’m so lonely. I don’t want to whine, Karen, but a letter from you would mean the world.

Okay, enough of that. There’s plenty of news, assuming you still want to hear it. As it turns out, I’m not the only one who’s beginning to believe Susan. The threats against her have been tapering off for a while, partly because we’ve got a couple of new babykillers in now, and partly because she’s talked to several of us, and I must admit you can’t help feeling sorry for her. She seems so like a lost little three-year-old herself.

Dad’s sensed the change and taken another of his famous risks. A lot of us are doubling up in our cells now because of overcrowding, and guess who he decided to put in with Susan Perett? Seabird. Yes, the wild woman. He had the guards watching closely for a while, but Seabird’s pretty calm now, and she and Susan actually seem to be getting along. In fact, Seabird told me she’s come to believe Susan, and she’s put out word that Susan’s okay. Which means if I’m a sucker, Karen, I’m not the only one. Seabird has a lot of influence here, and she also has a child of her own, a little boy she hasn’t seen in over a year. So it seems Dad’s unorthodoxy pays off again.

That’s not the only gossip in here. Do you remember hearing about Kathy Reno when we were out on the street and she was away in federal penitentiary? Everyone talked about how tough she was? Well, she’s here in ice. And she sure does sound tough. One of the guards told us she was shot a few years ago by a man whose woman she’d taken away from him, and she lost half her female organs. But she’s still so strong, the guard said, that when she was arrested it took five cops to bring her down.

I saw her going to get deloused yesterday. She’s big all right, with salt and pepper hair and real bright blue eyes. She looks like a weather-beaten, middle-aged Irish laborer. When she saw us peering at her through the door grill, she put her hands over her crotch and yelled at the guard that was escorting her in fake terror, “Oh, no. Don’t take me. I can’t bear it.” Her voice is kind of gritty, and she has a great grin. I liked her. Watch out, Karen. I just might step out on you.

Susan:

I didn’t mean for nothing to happen that day. It’s just that when she wet her bed during her afternoon nap, we decided we was going to teach her a lesson once and for all. Jimmy dragged her out of bed and told her to start running, to go back and forth between the bedroom and the bathroom until she could remember where she was supposed to sleep and where she was supposed to tinkle. Jimmy said he’s read about child psychology. Well, she started in running and I started thinking about that dragon lady and how she didn’t even think I knew how to be a proper mother to my own child and nor did that social worker and how they all looked down their noses at me like I was dirt, and how Ryan left me and Jimmy was always blaming me for the bad things she did and saying I was stupid for letting her get away with them, and we both were hitting her and she was running and everything was sort of blurry and I don’t remember much more about that afternoon.

Jenny:

Everything’s changed again, Karen, and it’s so tense in here you can hardly breathe. Kathy Reno came out of ice today. She joined us in the evening and started talking about Susan Perett. She’d been in county jail with both Susan and her boyfriend, James, and she heard them talking on the bus on the way back from court one day. She said she heard Susan say, “I told you not to hit her so hard,” and then he said, “Well, I wasn’t the one that burned her. If you hadn’t kept burning her with them cigarettes, we could have said the whole thing was an accident—she fell or ran into furniture or something.”

Reno said they went on like that the whole ride, and she found out it was Susan who stuffed the soiled panties into the little girl’s mouth, and the boyfriend who made her run back and forth (which the newspaper said went on for two hours) and that both of them hit and kicked her as she ran, and kicked her up when she fell, until she went down one last time and they couldn’t hit or kick her into getting up again.

Everyone was quiet for a few minutes after Reno finished talking, but then we all started in at once. We felt betrayed because we’d believed Susan and felt sorry for her. There were a lot of threats. A couple of the black women said they were going to get their hands on Susan and do the same thing to her she’d done to her little girl. Only Seabird didn’t say anything, just kept sitting with her face down and her hands in her lap.

Susan:

When we’d done punishing Cora Lee, we set her down on the sofa to rest and Jimmy went out for a six-pack. I was watching TV, and every now and then I’d check her out. She wasn’t moving a whole lot, except for now and then she had these thingies, heaving and shaking stuff. Convulsions they called it at the hospital. I went into her bedroom to get her stuffed Kermit, and I put it right on her chest, but I couldn’t seem to get her interested in it. When Jimmy came back, I asked if he thought we should take her to a doctor.

Jenny:

There was a terrible scene here last night. I was woken in the middle of the night by screaming—thin, high screams—and this awful bumping sound. Word was flying from room to room that Seabird had attacked Susan Perett. Our rooms aren’t like cells in the movies, Karen, wire cages you can just look out of. They’re self-contained with heavy cinder-block walls and wooden doors. There’s an open grill in the door and that’s all you can hear or see through. So I kept hearing this screaming and banging and Susan yelling, “Help me. Please help me.”

If this were the movies, you’d have guards running through the corridors in nothing flat, but not in life. Not here. The sounds went on forever and we were all up and banging on our doors and walls with shoes and hairbrushes and anything we could find and yelling at the top of our lungs and the thumping didn’t stop and nobody came.

Finally, one of the guards—this dipshit female with a fifties hairdo—comes running, looks in Susan’s door, and runs off again, with all of us jeering. She must have figured she needed reinforcements. Maybe she was only away a few minutes, but I was sure Susan would be dead by the time she came back.

Then she’s there again with two more guards and they go to open the door. It’s stuck. This is like some nightmare version of the three stooges. Susan isn’t screaming any more, but the banging hasn’t stopped and Blake’s fumbling away and another guard’s run off to control and finally the cell’s open and the three of them surge in.

A few minutes, and they’re dragging Seabird past my door. Naked. She’s limp and they’re dragging her by anything they can drag: Campbell’s got her by the hair and Hernandez has her under the arms and she’s not making any resistance, except she’s got the knife still clutched in her hand like every ounce of strength in her body is concentrated in her grip and Blake’s trying to pry it out while the others are dragging her, but it seems to me they’ll have to break her fingers one by one to get her to let go. Her eyes, Karen. That’s the main thing I see as she goes by. They look like black holes. She’s staring right at me, but she doesn’t see me, and looking into her eyes is like having someone push a sliver of ice very slowly between your ribs.

Then it’s Dad who’s running along the corridor, tucking his shirt into his pants. Guess they got him out of bed. He’s with two other guards, and they’ve got a stretcher for Susan Perett, and they put her on it and bring her past us and she looks like she’s dead for sure. She’s not lying straight, but kind of curled in on herself. Holes all over her pajamas, with blood seeping through everywhere, and her face the oddest color—dead white with a kind of sheen to it and dark and crepey under her eyes.

I let go of the grill bars on the door—my hands are aching because I’ve been holding on so hard—and go and sit down on the bed and stare at the wall. I don’t want to lie down. When I try to close my eyes, I’d see replays. Seabird’s eyes—over and over—and Susan Perett’s dead-white shiny face. And then I hear Reno, yelling across to someone in another cell, “Dumb bitch had it coming.” There’s laughter.

Karen, I’ve always thought I could talk my way out of any trouble. I thought I was that quick and clever and tough. But there are people in here who eat, breathe and sleep violence, who love it like it’s their child and live it in a way I could never conceive. I’m scared. For the first time since I got to this place, I’m scared.

Susan:

Hurt. Can’t move. Bandages all over, like a crust. Something slipping out of me. Between my legs. Blood. Dripping into the bandages. Darkness comes and goes. Dark blood. Still coming. Make it stop. It’s gonna come right through the bandages and flood the bed, flood the bed and drip onto the floor, flood the bed and the floor and flow along the corridor and go on forever and float me out of here like a river, like a huge, dark river roaring between my legs.

The river is full of babies. Pink babies, curled in little balls, falling through the water. Pink flesh shining through water. Dissolving. Transparent babies made of bubbles bobbing on the surface. Bumping into each other and spinning away. Washing up on the bank and popping. Floating off into air. Shining babies.

Jenny:

In the morning we found out more about what had happened. Turns out Perett isn’t dead. What we thought was a knife was a rat-tail comb of Seabird’s. Still, she did a fair amount of damage. She stabbed Susan dozens of times and took a chair to her and beat her head against the porcelain john in the cell. It’ll be a while before Perett is back from the hospital.

Her lawyer has already been around asking questions, though. He’s going to ask the governor to commute her sentence because he says the attack proves she isn’t safe in here. You see, all she was actually convicted of was being an accessory to the act. In court she said she’d just stood by helplessly while her boyfriend beat her little girl. Of course, he said the same thing, but in reverse. None of it matters very much though. Even if she doesn’t get a commute, she’ll still be out next June.

As for Seabird, they threw her in the hole to think it over, and I don’t know how long she’ll be there. When she gets out, the guards say she’ll be leaving, maybe for New Mexico again. The assault charge she picked up last night will probably add a couple of years to her sentence. Which is pretty funny, when you think about it.

Dammit, Karen, please, please write.

This quote was picked up joyfully by some female friends on Facebook who appeared to take those two words as a key to freedom. As in, “We’ve worried too long about pleasing other people.” But it puzzled me. I see a lot of comments about finding one’s boundaries, learning to say no, and turning away unpleasant would-be friends, and I couldn’t help wondering why so many reasonably comfortable and self-possessed women feel so horribly put upon, some of them even categorizing the entire male gender as toxic.

Had I been wronged? Had my entire life been wrecked by male chauvinism? Wasn’t I reasonably comfortable in my world and in my skin these days? Well, yes. But “The times they are a’changin’” as Bob Dylan sang, male dominance is swelling, and perhaps Mirren and my friends are on to something.

Like the lives of almost all women my age, mine was shaped to a large extent by masculine dominance I took for granted as a child, a teenager, and deep into my twenties. My mother, a refugee and widow who worked all and every day at the sewing machine to keep us housed and fed, pondered endlessly about what kind of life she could expect for her daughter. As she understood it there was no good pathway: No woman could ever enter a profession like doctor, lawyer, dentist, or professor. And though I was a dreamy kid in love with books, she knew that successful authors were almost all male.

My mother was intrigued when she learned that big stores hired female buyers and I had to remind her several times that there was almost nothing I hated as much as shopping for clothes.

Now I’m thinking of the job setbacks of my twenties: time spent as secretary for a New York lawyer, who paid a pittance while instructing me to prepare his coffee, pick up clothes from the cleaners, and edit his semi-literate kid’s school papers. He also told me the salary would double if I slept with him.

At one point I tended bar in the West Village subsisting primarily on tips from drunken men. But it turned out there was a requirement that--supposedly for their own safety--women had to step away before 10 p.m. The place was open until midnight when more and more customers came in and more and more drunken dollar tips piled up. All of which went to the male bartender who came in to replace me.

I don’t remember being profoundly angry when a construction worker whistled or yelled “Hey, look what some lucky guy gets,” though I suppose I should have been. But I deeply resented wearing hot stifling clothes on the hottest summer day because if a woman walked down the street in a summer dress some nasty male was almost certain to grab or pinch. This could happen in the subway too. New York was pretty wild in the 1960s and if you went to the movies alone, even to a high-end movie house, you were likely to find a man sitting next to you and masturbating. The stupidest male of these began caressing my right thigh when my boyfriend was with me sitting on the left. As his name suggests Angelo was Sicilian.

There was no need for me to utilize “fuck off.”

I was living in an anti-war hippie commune in California when the second wave of the feminist movement arose. You’d really think that leftist males would applaud that wave. Not a chance. One of the more intelligent among them set up a seminar for regular discussions of history and theory. On the first afternoon he checked out the room where I and two other women waited for him and rapidly stalked away angrily muttering that he wasn’t going to waste his time when nobody had shown up.

Then came graduate school in journalism where I discovered that females could get jobs only in what newspapers then called women’s pages--if we could get jobs at all. Finally I got one and discovered how much smaller my salary was than the salaries of men in similar positions.

There’s so much more--and so many women’s lives were and are so much harder than mine has ever been. But the realities of that time, the contempt and condescension women faced, the sheer difficulty of making a living wage, these things obviously had an effect on the psyche and on any level of confidence. Looking back from the lofty detached skies of old age I wonder if without all the years of male dominance I could have had more success in theatre when, trembling, I tried to enter the field. Or that later I had trusted my ability as a writer. Instead, when my book editor called to tell me I was a finalist for the National Book Award I marveled at her ignorance. She must be entirely confused since clearly that wasn’t possible. My skepticism was confirmed once I’d confessed to the foundation that I was not yet an American citizen and the book was withdrawn. Kindly then-director Neil Baldwin assured me that praise for the book had been high and I could still advertise the nomination but I didn’t have the confidence to creep out of the shadows and take on the look-at-me strut self-promotion would have required.

And now, after years of work, discussion and dispute by and among feminists, lawsuits and runs for public office, women have made progress. My daughter is a scientist, my friend’s daughter a lawyer, and no one is surprised to find a female doctor walking into the waiting room or that their senator is female. We see women hosting news shows or playing tough detectives on television, women guiding businesses, women directing plays, and female authors picking up Pulitzers.

Victory finally?

Not so fast.

The country we live in has been taken over by a group of men who intend to send us barefoot and pregnant back into the kitchen. Or, as the German slogan has it, spending our time solely with kinder, kuche, kirche. These men have organized control of our bodies and are causing despair, fear, and even death for some pregnant women. They insult professional women and have fired several who work within the government. They preach an ugly gospel that says men are intended to lead and women must return to the home, be entirely obedient, and push out dozens of babies. The vote that suffragists worked so hard and long to gain for all of us must be snatched away because our intellects are too weak for intelligent decision.

This is going to be a long and bitter fight and “fuck off” is far from sufficient.

But--thank you Helen--it’s a start.