Waking in First Light

While the Frozen Left lets democracy slip away, a little talk in the heat of late spring

This morning, as I do at least two mornings a week, I awoke around 3 AM. I was sleeping in my own bed, in a room with a working lamp and fan, surrounded by two dressers, a stack of books, and art objects either gifted to me or purchased with money earned from work. I was able to get up on my own two legs and walk to a working indoor toilet, use it, and pad into my very own kitchen, take out my coffee maker, scoop local artisanal coffee into the filter, extract potable water from my own faucet and pour it into the drip coffeemaker on my own kitchen counter. Flip a switch, listen to the drip, pull down a mug.

These are no small things. Taken together, you realize, “In America, we live like kings.”

I saw a video the other day, though I didn’t save it and don’t know who said it, that in the 21st century, Americans, and indeed many, many people, live like kings for the just the situation and services I noted. And no one is happy.

And though the Big “Haves” as well as too many “haves in denial” are never satisfied, more of us could be living like kings if it weren’t for about 2,000 rich people (nearly all white men) who can’t bear the thought of you having anything, let alone Blacks having so much as a vote, or Hispanics and Muslims sending their children to school. These same oligarchs hate Jews even as they fund Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. To prevent you and me and anyone brown from having a goddamned thing, they will bomb every nation and even blow up the planet. This isn’t even hyperbole. When I read yesterday that Trump’s DOJ, now his personal police force, awarded $1.7 billion to the January 6 insurrectionists—shown in the Mueller Report to be crisis actors (the Republican term) transported to D.C. and housed in hotels paid for by a Trump SuperPAC—I realized how idiotic Democrats have been to “trust the system.” We also know those feces-smearing cop-killers will never see a dime; all the money will go into a Trump trust or some such. But it’s our money. Our money.

I don’t even know how to feel mad anymore. I read that we the sentient have what is called Compassion Fatigue, and Outrage Exhaustion, pick a syndrome borne out of this Theatre of the Absurd that celebrates and normalizes those who engage in pedophilia and rape and grift, gets incensed by the idea of universal healthcare, and chooses unchecked guns over school safety, book bans over public education.

[At 5:29 AM, my peace in typing this on my little porch was interrupted by a big truck’s deafening engine in idle somewhere nearby, for maybe ten minutes, and I thought, “Of course.” It’s the perfect metaphor for America.]

This past weekend, one of my former students, ca. 1997-98, was in town for a wedding in Brooklyn and was determined to visit me, even after multiple delays, changing hotels, and helping return tuxedos. My strongest memory of this student is the first week of school in my tenth grade Humanities class, when I had the kids introduce themselves to the class using a question they hated being asked. His question was, “Are you mixed?” and his answer was, “I am a beautiful mulatto.” I recounted this to him when I saw him, finally, late Sunday evening. He lives out West now with his wife and son, and his best friend came along to Queens with him—in fact, this kid said his main reason for accompanying his bff to this wedding was a chance to see me—and apologize.

In fact, his first words coming down the stairs from the el train and seeing me were, “I love you!” And over the course of tequila shots and beer at my favorite bar, he explained what a troubled teen he had been, and he said something I’d never heard: “You held me with different hands than anyone else,” and those hands were full of “culture.” He felt cared for in a way that was new.

This exchange—the great conversation in general—reminds me how vital education is for mind and spirit, for sustenance in a dry-as-bones corporate world. Of my former profession, I told him that I would love to teach again—all I ever wanted to be was a teacher and learner—but not the way education is now. “I’d like to sit on some steps, like Socrates,” I said, and his friend said, “And philosophize!” Yes. Talk, think, observe. Make learning fun and human again.

I want to say that I gave this kid every out, texting, “It’s okay if you can’t come out here,” and “I’m too tired to get out to you,” and in truth I was really tired, being old now and feeling it at 7 PM on a Sunday; but he was determined, so I did it. My point here: always make an effort.

We can be surprised by visits, and we need to let visitors in. While I was home in Virginia the other week, my dad, Bernie, brother Jeff , and I were sitting outside on the little pea gravel patio, staring at sky and trees and the bird sanctuary that has formed around Bernie’s feeders, after a few hours of long-needed yard work. Suddenly a bird we’d never seen alighted on the feeder, wild black and white striped wings, a red breast, a golden beak. He was a vision. (I say “he” because any bird of colorful plumage is a male—to attract mates and distract predators from the nest, they say.) We all went crazy trying to identify it, commenting on the markings, watching the movements. Wow.

Google Lens identified the bird as an adult male Rose-breasted Grosbeak, and indeed the female is a simpler golden brown color. It turns out the bird should be in the mountains on his migration, some 50 miles west, but he stopped over for a meal.

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Rose-breasted_Grosbeak/id

This sighting got me thinking about female beauty. I remember by mom, Lynne, saying to me when I balked at wearing lipstick and mascara the year I’d lost my natural bloom and students wanted to give me a makeover, feeling as if it would call unnecessary attention to myself: “Honey, you don’t wear makeup so they notice you; you wear it so they don’t.” She was right.

“Beauty is invisibility,” I read on a post the other day, where men write in the radical female content creator’s comments, “You are so beautiful” in response to a video on social justice for women. I’ve had men do that to me—compliment my hair in mid-sentence. I’m not heard, not seen. So many ways for men to miss out through misogyny.

Years ago, my best friend at the time, a man, asked me what I wanted in a relationship. “Great conversations,” I said, and he snorted, “Yeah, you’re gonna be alone.” And I am. He was absolutely right. I cannot have great conversations with most men, or I can but only to a point, and right when I’m reaching a new understanding, or sharing one, or moving them so they might figure something out, they crack a joke. Every. Time. I’m sorry about that.

And so it was a delight to have a great and serious and also fun conversation with a former male student. Curiously, it’s not the drama students who seek me out to visit after many years so much as it is the language arts kids, like this student. While the intensity of a weeks-long rehearsal process in the drama club creates fast friends, perhaps it’s the 9-month incubation of a high school English class that births the real relationships.

We cannot have it all—in friends, in citizens, in a nation—but if we look around for a minute and make space for visitors, we already have more than we realize. Now, how to get people in power to see this, to want this for all of us? As theater legend Joseph Chaikin said, “I want to change my life and everyone else’s. I don’t know how to do it. And if not the life, then the day, the evening, the hour, the minute.” Chaikin also came to realize that change doesn’t happen “en masse,” but rather “one by one by one.” One conversation at a time, one tough year at a time.

Most every morning, I wake too early and in a panic about the planet, our country, and the next pandemic borne of idiots. Today, I enjoyed a little light. Hope you found some light, too.

Love, somehow,

Miss O’

Sunrise. Queens

Talking of Moms

Coming back from quick trip down South to see my dad

Yesterday morning, en route to a stop at D.C.’s Union Station from Woodbridge (where I’d traveled to from New York last Friday), I sat next to a young Black man snoozing with sunglasses on. He was about the only person on that early morning train from Richmond not spread out while asleep, leaving space for a seat mate. He began waking when we got to Alexandria, and I asked where he was getting off—anticipating when we need to move out of the way for a seat mate’s disembarking is important train etiquette. “D.C.,” he said, and I asked where he was coming from. “Richmond, but I live in D.C.,” and I said, “Not a bad trip, but early,” and he said, “That’s why you caught me snoozing,” and he smiled, then asked where I was headed, and then if I’d been down for Mother’s Day. “My mom died last year,” I said; “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, gently, and I said, “Thanks,” and explained that I wanted to be home for my dad. I didn’t get a chance to find out about his own mother, as we pulled into Union Station and he needed to get his bag. Such a nice guy.

I myself snoozed quite a bit on my journey from D.C. to my destination, when I wasn’t reading a 1967 Amanda Cross detective novel, The James Joyce Murder—highly academic and modeled on Peter Wimsey mysteries but with a female and radically feminist amateur sleuth. I haven’t felt much like murder mysteries, what with the world being full of murder, hate, mayhem, injustice, all that. Hence the naps, I guess.

Talking to new people on the train is a favorite pastime—but there was very little in the way of chatting with strangers going down or coming back. A youngish woman (tall, white, long strawberry blonde hair, maybe 40) got on in D.C. en route to New Brunswick (as it turned out), but we didn’t begin talking until Trenton, when we fell into a very deep conversation about her mom’s Alzheimer’s and my mom’s death (all this beginning with, “I’m going home for Mother’s Day” or some such), the difference between mental and physical decline—we agreed that the physical is less awful. Her 76-year-old mother is in great physical health right now, but calls this woman and her younger sister by the names of of her own younger sisters—the regression to youth is fascinating and also deeply sad (my half-sister’s mother called my sister “Becky” for a decade before she died, and my sister always answered, “Well, hey, Ann,” like it was normal—very hard). At New Brunswick, my seat mate departed and another youngish woman got on (50 to my 62, as it turns out) and sat beside me, beaming from this great road trip to four high school friends, she said. We too entered into this unexpectedly deep conversation on Mother’s Day, her own mom in Nepal, aged 82 and with the need for a heart procedure, and whom she can’t visit because of the Iran war now, given all the travel problems. We agreed, with an understanding beyond words, that the U.S. government is totally batshit now, I saying simply, “It’s all so awful and stupid,” and she nodding sadly. I talked of my mom’s death—it turns out my Nepalese companion is a doctor (she’d vaguely mentioned “the healthcare field” and I’m sure she’d been deliberately vague because people say, “Hey, let me ask you…,” and I clearly wasn’t going to do that). “I deal with that every day,” she said of death and dying, including families in denial, and spoke of the importance of hospice. In Nepal there is a form of hospice in the Temple, where the dying are taken to be attended by healers and shaman, and that sounded pretty good to me, but now there is a cost to be incurred even for that. (I see more clearly than ever that nothing is free in any village anymore; the triumph of Western corporate capitalism is that a few white men get rich off everyone’s paying them for what they, the villagers, used to get for free, thanks to the threat of weapons and the mercenaries who wield them.) In addition, her beloved family dog is seriously ill, and her children (ages 12 and 14) and worried. All that learning—about Nepal and dying and parents and lives— in the short run from New Brunswick to Newark to New York. I moved to get up when we entered the NJ-NY tunnel to get my backpack, as my new friend moved for me, and bade her a good trip back to Boston, wished her mother and her dog well. As we do.

I lined up in the aisle as others stood to get their bags and noticed a young white man reading an old Mickey Spillane paperback. “Mickey Spillane,” I said, and he looked up, telling me he was reading all those old-school writers now, like Spillane, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and I recommended The Maltese Falcon for a good movie version of Hammett. He was loving the language, including the new phrase “slopping beer,” and I found his enthusiasm heartening. Across the aisle from him was a short, round old lady with pageboy white hair and a visor, who was saying to the tall young black man next to her, moving into the aisle, “Tie your shoe,” and then, pointing, “Your shoe’s untied,” and the fellow obeyed her and he tied it, and she added, “Sorry, my retired vice-principal-of-an-elementary-school is showing,” and he smiled, and she said, “I can’t let you trip!” He asked, “Do you have a bag to get?” and she pointed to the front of the car, a pink rolling suitcase, and he said, “Easy to spot at the airport,” and she said, “That was the idea,” and he pulled it out and also got his own, and they worked out a system so he could help her get her suitcase off the train. How sweet was that?

There is something about the confinement of travel in short spaces that breaks us open, and I think the sentiment of Mother’s Day hovered over us, too, filled us all with an awareness of where we all come from. Everyone was birthed into this world through a mom, and so many of us seem like moms. (I myself was wished an enthusiastic “Happy Mother’s Day!” by no fewer than three (Black) women at various points this past week, and I just said, “Thank you! You too!”)

There aren’t many universals anymore, or so it seems—mothers, certainly, whatever the degree of influence over or care they gave us. Another, surely, is food. I would say a third universal is responding positively to cuteness, whether it’s dogs or cats or babies, and anyone who is ambivalent about or hostile toward moms, nourishment, or cuteness needs to work a hard, hideous job and live quietly in a hole without access to weapons of any kind.

Cuteness: my 5-year-old nephew insisted on carrying my backpack.

During my stay in the South, my youngest brother, who lives in North Carolina with his family, introduced me and our brother Jeff to the series Tucci in Italy, and when we got back to Virginia, Jeff and I watched the other five episodes. We then received the “Recommended for You” idea to watch No Taste Like Home with Queer Eye’s Antoni Porowski, in which Antoni takes celebrities on a tour to discover their roots through family dishes they have always loved. In that way, Jeff and I traveled to Yorkshire, England, and again to Italy, thence to Germany, Senegal, and Malaysia. Everywhere Antoni goes are women and men preparing local food, and you get a chance to see how geography and colonization inform every aspect of their lives and, in turn, the lives of those who emigrated.

Something about a road trip. I was disgusted by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy encouraging Americans to take summer road trips with gas at $5.00/gallon— for his own oil profit, no doubt. Jeff and i wanted to spare our brother the expense.

Back in Virginia, hanging out with my dad, we watched sports and walked the neighborhood, talked about how much we both miss Lynne, shared memories. Food was always important to my dad, a retired meat cutter and short order cook in the Air Force, but he said, “I just don’t feel like cooking anymore.” When we did set about making a meal, we both found ourselves looking up the stairs, wondering what Mom would like to eat. It’s been a year but it’s flown by, and last May’s ordeal feels like yesterday, and today.

Awkward family photos. Bernie is 92.

Universals. We all thrive when we have shelter and access to nourishing food and clean water, but more than that, loving homes and creative community culture. And I couldn’t help thinking about how far America has pulled away from all this in favor of corporate structures, bottom lines, 401Ks, screen-screed loneliness, AI, and endless consumerism (says the woman who consumed 11 episodes of two shows on a paid subscription streaming network that still forces commercials on us because we accept it as normal).

I told you once about that professor I had at Virginia Tech, an old (my age now, no doubt) white-haired, deeply Southern white man named Byers (I think), who in his American Literature class asked us what was meant by the term universal. After some attempts from his students in answer, Prof. Byers intoned, “A good example of a universal is a warm [woah-um] shower [show-ah]. Everyone enjoys a whoa-um show-ah.” At the time of his pronouncement, ca. 1983, the only people “enjoying” a warm shower were almost exclusively Westerners, and only since around 1950. In any case, I remember finding his example weirdly specific, if not a little creepy. How about food? I thought. How about being birthed by moms?

I also think connection is vital to our universal survival, as I’ve previously noted, and I was touched to find how important that remains, even to strangers on a train.

Sending you love, this day after Mother’s Day,

Miss O’

Aunt Lisa in conversation with a new generation. Photo by my nephew’s mom.

Only Connect: A guide to throwing a word and why

On the N Train downtown from Queens Friday evening, a man got on at 59th Street. He asked, “Does this go to 49th?” Yes, I said, but he didn’t hear. “49th?” he said again to an oblivious car. YES, I said louder. He waved a thanks and got on. I turned to a younger woman looking at me, and said, “At least, it’s supposed to,” as another little man got on, grinning with an accent, “Brooklyn? Brooklyn?” and I called out, YES, and he got on and the door closed. The younger woman said, “You’re the subway tour guide.” “I was a school teacher,” I said, “brought students here for field trips.” I paused. We were seated in those L-arrangements peculiar to the N-W-Q-R line, so we were catty corner facing one another. A story occurred to me. Do I throw the word?

I threw. “Years ago I got off an exit to use the bathroom at a Wendy’s,” I said, catching her eye and she was attentive, so I continued, “and inside there was this officious kind of woman directing people to the bathroom, explaining, ‘That first stall is broken, keep going,’ and I looked at her and said, ‘You’re a school teacher,’ and she said, ‘Second grade!’ Teachers are fearless like that, and we help.”

The young woman advised, “Wendy’s has the worst bathrooms,” and so it was we chatted at each stop until she got off at 34th St—I was headed to Union Square. We talked about how strangers on the subway don’t chat the way they used to, everyone looking down into their phones, for one thing. She got off at her stop, and I said something about how you never know when you’ll see someone again. She said, “I’m Anita,” and I said, “I’m Lisa.” We said farewell at 34th.

And in NYC, these connections, however tenuous, matter. You are reminding another person, yourself, and anyone listening in, “We are nice people. There are nice people, people who think about things, who observe the world around them, and connect to other people. You can do that too, if you want.”

View from Union Square

Outside at Union Square, I walked University Place toward Washington Square Park, heading to the Skirball Center to hear the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, in its 45th year—one charter member still singing!—and gave myself time to wander Greenwich Village as dusk rolled in, the best time. In my walks I make a point of making eye contact, smiling—not idiotically, but because it’s a nice thing to do. It’s spring, be here, have this experience. The park is nice.

In the theater, I found my balcony seat. I’d never been to one of these concerts, but I’d learned that my boss was in the chorus, and I knew he’d be glad someone from the office came. Plus, it’s a chance to hear choral music, which I used to hear twice a year when I was a teacher going to high school seasonal choir concerts. I love choral music but never think to seek it out. Beside me to my right sat two young women, aged 30 at most. Like me, they were pouring over the list of names, and I found my boss listed in the basses, which surprised me—I took him for a tenor. Before the show, I’d asked the girls if they were visiting, and I got their stories: one had just moved here from Tennessee with a boyfriend, and the other was visiting because her best friend since preschool (!) was in the NYCGMC. Did I live here? Yes, for 23 years almost, and the recent arrival said, “If you don’t mind my asking, why did you move here?” And thence the story of losing my house to eminent domain, and she asked, “What is that?” And I explained eminent domain, and they were shocked. “They had to pay you, right?” Only because someone told me to ask about it. “What do you do here now?” I gave them every out, to be clear, so they didn’t have to listen to me, and tried to draw them out so they didn’t have to humor me in the story of my life, but weirdly they kept asking questions, learning about a life in textbooks—you’ve heard all this. But it was really sweet, this keen interest from the kids. Hopeful, I think.

The choir entered and arranged themselves on risers—some 250 men, all decked out in their own styles of white, gold, and silver. Long sleeves, short sleeves, net tops, sequined tops; accessories of gold and silver, the common ground the white pants. And I realized I had no idea where my boss would be, so I did what I had to do: I started at the bottom left and worked my way across the rows of faces, one by one by one, during the beautiful medley of “Pure Imagination” and “Over the Rainbow,” and the looking moved me as much as the listening—the unexpected specificity of all those faces, ages, races, sizes, heights, body types, styles of expression—all joined together by their shared struggle and triumph in the face of a hateful society, and meeting us all with love, dammit, love.

Finally, I found my boss, center, fourth row from the top, singing in his silver shirt. Next to me, I heard the girls finding their friend, “the brown shirt,” though there were a few fellows with golden brown tops. I was a little startled that the bff girl, during the performance, kept checking her texts; and at two or three moments she got up and went outside for several minutes at a time. At one point she returned and put her head on her friend’s shoulder. I’m glad I’d talked to them beforehand, because I might have been super annoyed and said something to her—but I couldn’t help feeling, because of our recent connection, that the bff girl had something very serious going on back in Knoxville, and she was only here in New York because she wanted to be here to support her friend. After the show, I never remarked on anything except to say, “I hope you gals have a great visit,” and off they went.

Out on the sidewalk, on the lookout, I saw my boss come outside looking for someone, turning to go back in when I caught him. He looked, his eyes got wide, and he embraced me—wouldn’t let go. Thanked me for coming, wanted to know how they sounded. “Great!” And they did. Then he said, “I have to thank you for being a rock on this project,” speaking of our work life, and it’s in these outside, joyful places we can tell people what we are thinking, what we don’t express. Nothing went to my head, believe me, and we parted with a wave as I set off back across Washington Square.

Back to a Queens-bound W Train at 14th St, a woman who looked like Taraji P. Henson (whom I’d just seen Monday in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in the Broadway revival, and it’s splendid), in full glam mode, got on with her (I think) son; she sat down beside me, turned to me with her big lashed eyes and said, “You are so [unheard].” I said, “I’m sorry?” “Beautiful,” she said, “you are just beautiful.” Gray-haired ancient me said, “Thank you, so kind,” “I call what I see,” she said, and I added, truthfully, “You are gorgeous,” and she said, “I’ll take it.” We smiled. The young man, a big teddy bear, was standing with his phone, and I asked if he wanted to sit and I’d change seats—no, he’s good at the pole—and I admired his really cool green plaid coat.

And I share all these mundanities—here adding the glam woman’s call to me at 34th Street, where they were getting off (a lot of connecting trains lead there), “You have an amazing night,” and I said, “You too!”—because the whole evening had built to good fellow feeling, connections without fear, with compliments, good humor, hope; I was about as peaceful as I’d been in months.

May all your puddles have petals. Queens

This afternoon I took a break from work to run to the post office to mail a friend a gift of notebooks I’d picked out for her at the MoMA P.S. 1 gift shop in Long Island City yesterday. There was a line—six or eight people, only one person working a window (of course), but it was that really nice Korean lady who is super efficient and helpful and unfazed by all the different needs—a little family of three finishing a passport application for their baby, a woman in need of a money order, artist-sellers with envelopes and packages with special needs for sending. The worker asked a woman customer if she wanted to pay for tracking, and she’d said no, but a woman three people behind me in line said something to her in Spanish, and the customer said, “Oh, si, si,” and this other woman called to the postal worker, “She does want the tracking, she didn’t understand,” and I smiled at her (I was next to go up) and she said, “I’m bilingual but I couldn’t think of the word for tracking,” and the woman just in front of her turned around and told her the word. She practiced it. Amazing. I said, “I only speak one language, and I lose words all the time,” I reached in the air, “Words!” and she smiled. I went up, got the package mailed, and as I left, the translating woman caught me with her voice, “Have a good day,” and I said, “You too!”

Now here’s the crazy thing: As I’m going out the door to the little alcove area, I held the door for a woman with packages, and another woman in sunglasses walked in behind her, and as I went through the alcove to the street door, I hear, “Lisa?” and the voice takes off her sunglasses and I look and she looks and she says, “The train,” and I say, “Anita?” We couldn’t believe it, each figuring the other lived in Astoria, where the N-W Trains originate. She said she couldn’t stop thinking about things I’d said, especially about how you never know when you’ll see people, and there we were. Turns out, we live a block from each other. Go know.

So here’s what I’m saying: I think the only way we beat these fucking corporate Republicans and Democrats at their stupid power and insider training games and actually get shit done for us, the People, is to 1) come out and vote in droves; and 2) connect, connect, connect, connect. Okay?

Sending love,

Miss O’

Word on the subway is, this is beautiful. And who isn’t really? Really. Except some people. You know who I mean.

For That Little Bit of Food

On the mess it takes to make

Years ago, my super (and friend) was at my apartment to make a repair, and he noticed my sink filled with dishes—I’d made a pasta salad, involving boiling and draining pasta, cutting vegetables (scallions, tomatoes, etc.), adding feta, and so on. Assorted pots, a colander, and cutting boards were piled in the sink, along with knives, forks, spoons.

On seeing the finished product, a medium sized pottery bowl with a nice few portions of pasta salad under plastic wrap heading into the fridge, he clucked his tongue. “All that mess for such a little bit of food.” Well, yes. Had this handy man never watched his wife or grown daughters cook or clean up?

But that moment stayed with me—sort of embarrassed me, the way he thought, “for that little bit of food.” Why had I felt embarrassed? I mean, I’d watched him pour out a half dozen tools, rags, and plumber’s sealing tape onto the floor to fix a leak, and it would never occur to me to say, “All that mess for such a tiny little leak.” Let’s face it: most things worth doing require making a mess. It’s the tragedy, and joy, of being human. Life is not gossamer; no amount of meditation and austerity changes the reality that, to start, 1) humans must eat and drink; and 2) humans must evacuate waste. Planting, growing, cooking, and plumbing of all kinds: life’s basics don’t do themselves.

I thought of this again this morning: I’d walked over to LabCorp to get bloodwork done after 12 hours of fasting, so on my way home, I stopped by The Sconery for a (savory) scone treat. At home, I got out my little coffee maker, scooped out coffee into the reusable filter, poured in water, and let it perk; I poured some half and half into a small cream pitcher (to better control the amount used); I made a quick one-egg omelet with the last half of a cheese slice, to eat on the cracked pepper scone.

Following this little repast, a simple breakfast feeding just me (and I didn’t even have to make the scone), I had the following dishes in the sink:

  • Little bowl for scrambling the egg
  • Fork for the beating the egg
  • Small cast iron skillet for cooking the egg
  • Table knife to cut butter for the skillet
  • Coffee scoop
  • Small cream pitcher
  • Spoon for stirring
  • Plate
  • Coffee pot
  • Reusable filter and insert
  • Coffee mug
  • Water glass for taking my morning meds

All those dishes for a little bit of food, a cup of coffee, and a pill. That’s how it is.

And this was lunch.

Anyone who does projects knows this—to sew anything, say, I have to set up the sewing machine, get out the fabric scissors, the thread and bobbin, the seam ripper (always), all the stuff; whether this is making curtains or sewing a tiny seam split in a pair of pants, it’s the same drill. If you make collages or draw or paint or whatever, you have to get out all the stuff. Even to make a small card for a friend, or a bookmark, it’s all that mess to clean up and put away for a little bit of creative output. Even a bookshelf, when hung up, looks like “of course,” no one thinking about the sawdust.

Last weekend, my best college buddy Richard came over with his two teenagers, who, after lunch, napped in various spots in the apartment while he and I went through a big envelope of theater memorabilia from our college days. I was cleaning out a closet last weekend when I happened on it, and thought, I need to make some kind of scrapbook or toss it. Being a BA theater major was, as I’ve said many times, the luckiest thing I could have been. (I distinguish this from a BFA—a bachelor of fine arts—which is narrow in focus, an actor never learning set design, for example; in our liberal arts program we did it all.) You learn all the theater trades, practice on many shows, from black box to main stage, and figure out what you like about it and what you are good at. It was awesome. Though you sure get tired doing all you do.

Theatre Arts-University Theatre is now The School of Performing Arts at Virginia Tech. I recommend it.

This sorting made us tired, too, program after program, script after script, party notices, “Break a leg!” cards, SETC (Southeastern Theater Conference) badges. “I was on the makeup crew for She Stoops to Conquer?” Richard asked, thumbing over the names in one program. “I did wardrobe for this?” I said, handing Richard a program for a show in which he got “special thanks.” We’d never heard of it, to see our reactions, let alone recalled working on it. And yet there our names were. Other times the programs brought back loads of memories, “Oh my god, remember that turntable that didn’t turn, and we all had to push it from backstage, in costume,” “…and the tech director got fired for buying cheap casters?” but most of them were fond memories. From hauling boards in from the truck to building stud walls and constructing flats; to measuring actors, to fabric shopping and cutting cloth from patterns; to putting makeup on faces and taking it off with cold cream afterward. “How did we do all that?” “And classes, and parties…?” To say nothing of hydrating.

I suppose one way of looking at it is, “All that mess for such a little bit of show.” But that’s never the whole story.

Ca. 1982-86; I just realized I graduated 40 years ago. [Insert popping eyes.]

I watched YouTube videos about photographers this week—I got on a Richard Avedon kick, thence to Henri Cartier-Bresson, Chuck Close, Mary Ellen Mark, always learning—and one commentator brought up how much paper and how many dark room supplies went into producing each large-scale photo that landed on museum walls. (So much mess for such a little bit of beauty? Yes.)

In further video travels, I watched Lucy Worsley Investigates: The American Revolution on PBS, and I admit that I thought, in passing, about the war, “All that mess for such a (little bit of?) new world order.” And really—when any act is all about money and power—it is a lot of mess, and for, too often, such a lot of nothing but destruction and misery. Worsley finds, for example (seeking the British view), that if King George III hadn’t had a huge 7 Years’ War debt to pay off, he wouldn’t have signed the Stamp Act, and if he’d listened to the colonists’ reasonable complaints about taxation without representation, they wouldn’t have revolted, and Britain’s Empire wouldn’t have fallen, and who knows? Still a mess, no doubt, and the mess continues amid the stabs at progress, and no use looking back.

The latest world order upset is Trump’s unstable, treacherous presidency, his support of Israel, and his attack on Iran—all that mess to distract from such a little bit, oh, wait, an ungodly amount of pedophilia and bribery and corruption.

Money and power, power and depravity. I’ve been reading a few articles during my doom scrolling hiatus, and the more investigating people do into Epstein (to take one example)—and loads of terrific independent journalists are doing just that, unrelentingly—the more horrible and seemingly unstoppable these diseased forces seemed to be; but they are stoppable. This is changeable.

But my god the mess in their wake. Their mess is vast and awful, but we gotta clean it up so we can start fresh. Again. Like doing the dishes. Like a set strike.

And how much better would we all be if our messy work were for creative, useful, and community purposes (with women to guide it)? So much better.

Sending love, all the detritus now in plastic sleeves in a tidy (ahem) binder,

Miss O’

Summer Arts Festival, 1985; Final Directing project 1986. How did l learn all those lines? And pass my classes? And have fun? And feed myself? It can be done. Also, I hope you are charmed by the handcrafted nature of that college program. I made it.

Stories We Just Don’t Recall (till a poet shows you)

Disappointment and despair, everything secret
I believed I could never tell anyone, were single threads

in the prairie’s great cloak of grass and sky.

from “Standing in the Middle of a Great Field,” Cheyenne, Wyoming, 1983, Adah, age 94 (from Stories We Didn’t Tell by Anna Citrino, p. 238)

It’s always a surprise what hearing poetry gets you thinking about.

My mom, Lynne, died on Thursday evening, June 5, 2025, and Friday was all about the mortuary and paperwork. Saturday morning, around 4:00 AM, my sister and I found ourselves up at that witching hour with our dad, sitting in a small darkened living room, rocking in our respective chairs or sitting quietly, with coffee, when Dad suddenly blurted out all the traumas of Lynne’s childhood, traumas we knew nothing about, including the entire year, when Lynne was maybe seven, that her mom lived and worked in Omaha without even communicating with her daughter, who’d had to live with relatives. Bernie is crying, sobbing, for the pain this caused his beloved wife. My sister and I looked at each other, same thought, and I say, “Dad, was Grandma pregnant?” A divorced woman with child, especially with a daughter in Catholic school, would have been carrying more sins than any confessional could bear.

Dad looked at me, at us, uncomprehending. It’s funny what a woman understands, or is quick to suspect, things that a man wouldn’t even consider. In the end, we will never know, and my poor mom was abandoned by her mother and ignored by her father, who was quite possibly overseas in WWII at the time. That pain could never be made right.

Does it matter enough
that, if you could have the dead back

for an hour, these would be the questions
you would ask?


~ from “Our Family Tree and Other Myths” (from the collection of the same name by Jean LeBlanc, p. 37)

This event from last year rose in my chest as I listened to my poet friends Jean LeBlanc and Anna Citrino read from their latest collections via a Zoom event this evening, both poets published by Shanti Arts: Our Family Tree and Other Myths and Stories We Didn’t Tell.

Our Family Tree and Other Myths by Jean LeBlanc. (These are the selfies I send my artist friends when their works arrive at my house.)
Glad I managed to get the title AND author’s name in this one.

Both poetry collections, which couldn’t be more different in terms of approach, style, and geography, are deeply connected in their subjects’ perseverance, struggles, and connection to the natural world.

Anna, Jeannie, and I met in 1990, the very first late June day on arriving at the Bread Loaf School of English to begin our MA program. From the first, it was clear these women were deeply soulful and talented—each in possession of great cameras, too, photographing the Vermont landscape from our first walk. I was a theater major and very lost English teacher, sans camera, still trying to find herself, no writer, but somehow I managed to get admitted on a “rural teacher scholarship” (the MA was geared to teachers). I took it on faith. One of the best joys of lifelong friendships, really, is evenings like tonight, where I listen to women I’ve known over 35 years grow into these astonishing artists. My degree has served to help me appreciate the great work they do, and therefore to open up my understanding of the world. Not bad.

This evening, as Anna and Jean read (via an app thingy none of us (as Jean said) could have imagined in 1990), something profound occurred to me: I have no home place. Whereas Anna is a product of California sky and eucalyptus (by way of Wyoming), and Jean is New England to the core (by way of Quebec), I’m, well, a sort of Virginian (though Northern Virginia (NOVA) really doesn’t count as Virginia), via the U.S. military (because my naval officer mom was stationed at Barracks K in Arlington) by way of Iowa (which my dad always called “home”). I didn’t really belong anywhere. The natural world encounters of my suburban childhood felt inadvertent. I’d meet kids whose families went back generations on farms in NOVA before it was NOVA, and they seemed vaguely alien to me, with their wild cedars for Christmas trees and lapses into Southern dialect at home, dialect they never used at school. I never knew how to feel about that.

Whatever I am, presently a New Yorker, and whatever my insoluble confusions over identity, it’s artists who shake us out of our stupors to look at our truths in the face. So let’s just say I have a lot of thinking to do, right after I reread (yet again) both collections.

You can find these wonderful poetry collections I mentioned at Shanti Arts, based in Brunswick, Maine. May I recommend them? I may. Consider adding Anna’s and Jeannie’s books to your library. Consider, in this our National Poetry Month, adding poetry to your life.

Happy April.

The Mass of Men: Thoughts from a pagan on Good Friday

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Last Saturday, March 28, around 2 PM, I made my way to Columbus Circle via the 7 and 1 Trains, avoiding barricades by walking along the sidewalk to 7th Avenue, where I easily slipped into the No Kings 3 March in New York City. I did the first march to Madison Square Park back in October, but missed No Kings 2 in January due to illness—but it’s when you see a woman with one leg use sticks to walk the full length of No Kings 3 that I feel embarrassed to have let a little flu and a sprained toe stop me last time.

There were many creative signs, but sometimes “literal” does the job. LO’H

The march this time included many young people—almost none were in the first No Kings march, and I didn’t blame them, this is on us, the old—because they have skin in the game now, what with the draft being reinstated to fight idiotic wars started to help a pedophile* avoid jail; and the march included almost no people of color outside of a few Chinese and other Asian Americans—and that is as it should be, because this whole mess of a nation, of a world, is the fault of white people, full stop. It’s our mess to fix.

I caught several shots of the national protest garden—one butterfly carrier explained to me, “This butterfly is the only orange monarch we want.” LO’H

“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.” ~ Henry David Thoreau, “Natural History of Massachusetts.” The Dial (July 1842)

On Monday night, in ideal timing, PBS aired the first of three episodes of Thoreau, a Ken Burns-produced (but not really his) documentary of the 19th century New England writer, naturalist, and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau, the guy you read in American Literature in 11th grade, about whose work my high school classmate Scott declared, “If I read one more word of Walden I’m going to Thoreau up.” The documentary might change even Scott’s mind about the importance of, and prescience of, Thoreau, who saw the damage that industrialization and unfettered capitalism were doing to human beings and to the earth and was determined to do something. I recommend the three-part series, streaming for free on PBS (the funding of which was saved by an Obama-appointed judge this week, another reason elections matter).

Thoreau succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 44, having written works that inspired Gandhi (in an ironic twist, as Thoreau himself was inspired by Eastern religions) and Martin Luther King, Jr. One of the commentators notes that tuberculosis is “a wasting disease,” and I remembered that it used to be called consumption—now I get it, as it consumes all your bodily abilities and functions. Curiously, it occurs to me, our national consumption—of resources and useless crap alike—via capitalism, is wasting our planet, and I wonder if HDT saw that parallel.

This week too, in media bingeing via YouTube, I happened on a 1971 Dick Cavett interview with the theater legend Zero Mostel, most famous for playing Tevye in the original Fiddler on the Roof as well as the original Max Bialystock in the 1967 movie The Producers. From his entrance prior to being introduced, antically looming over Cavett’s shoulder, Mostel showed himself to an ungovernable guest, Cavett spending the next hour and a half never sure what Mostel would say or do, where he would wander, whether or not he’d actually perform “If I Were a Rich Man,” or answer interview questions at all. It’s great television, and particularly interesting to me because crazy though Robin Williams was on talk shows, he wasn’t dangerous the way Mostel was—and Mostel’s timing was knife’s edge right—he’d pull back the peculiar just in the nick of time, right before it became disturbing.

As it turned out, Mostel proved to be a great guest and shared terrific insights and anecdotes about his creative life, which began as a painter, working on murals for the WPA (Works Progress Administration) in the 1930s. I also learned that he and actor-director Burgess Meredith (Penguin on the 1960s Batman television series) invented the concept of Storytime Theater, performing James Joyce’s novel Ulysses as monologues (Mostel does two selections from it during the show); the group Elevator Repair Service (ERS) here in New York carries on this legacy—go know.

Like Thoreau, Mostel died relatively young, of heart failure at age 62 (the age I turn in May, I can’t help thinking). In Walden, Thoreau begins, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” He says, “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” and watching Mostel, I thought that Henry David would be delighted to see an unlikely compatriot.

These two marvelous men and the Thoreau series got me thinking: 1) men, the cis-gender hetero male human animals, should either be artists, philosophers, performers, farmers, laborers, or craftsmen, and that is it; 2) women** and gay men should handle all the politics, education, fiscal management, and societal responsibilities, and do whatever else they want of the male activities listed; 3) children should be able to roam free in the woods; *I never want to hear the word “pedophile” again, goddammit. (**Bondi and Noem types should be farm laborers, if they are lucky.)

I saw Nathan Lane on Colbert’s Late Night this week, talking about returning to Broadway in Death of a Salesman. Zero Mostel told Dick Cavett, who’d asked him his opinion about towering performances like Lee J. Cobb’s in the original Death of a Salesman, that Miller had sent Mostel the script first. Mostel’s thought on reading it was that the great French comic actor Michel Roux could do something wonderful with the part. But of course, Mostel said, “it was a typical Group Theater production,” and here he bent over, “Doom at the entrance,” and Mostel stood up, slumped, “Doom,” and he leaned over the small table into Cavett’s face, “Doom.” I knew exactly what he meant—everyone plays the end right away; Mostel’s casting idea made me think of Michael Scott in The Office, an ace salesman who had the opposite fate, promoted via the Peter Principle to a role of incompetence in management, thus creating comedy out of tragedy. Actors who play the part of Willy Loman, from Cobb to Dustin Hoffman to Brian Dennehy, end up hospitalized or at least cutting back from 8 shows a week to 6. “I’m on a death watch,” joked Lane (coincidentally the original Max Bialystock in the 2001 Broadway musical version of The Producers), who is playing all 8 so far. So now I’m intrigued to see what the cast and director Joe Mantello are doing with the play (which I saw just a couple of years ago in a revival with Wendell Pierce, a great actor, who played Willie as mentally ill out of the gate). I’ll let you know.

Exhaustion is upon us all. I awoke this morning with memory flashes of the dozens and dozens of times throughout my life that friends have looked at me as if I were a laboratory experiment gone wrong—not unlike the way Cavett looked at Mostel, but without the gentle bemusement. I remembered a quote my mom, Lynne, was fond of:

“The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.” ~ William Makepeace Thackery, Vanity Fair

I don’t know what you see, but I see sad, tired, forced-bemused, old. And scene. We all are reflecting the weight of national insanity.

I wear my state of mind on my face, no question, and more often than not my mind is not the expected thing—it disturbs. It occurred to me, on waking and recalling the faces reflecting my face, that as April begins, your Miss O’ would do well to take a couple of weeks off the ol’ media, looking for some kind of resurrection of the soul. If I can’t find woods to walk in, I have the trees along 50th Avenue in Queens, anyway.

Hoping your spring brings you the renewal you need, with love,

Miss O’

P.S. I can’t believe I forgot this one:

This woman speaks for all of us. Favorite sign at No Kings NYC. LO’H

Bits and Pieces

Random fragments from a charged week

“I got a job for which I was ill-prepared and unqualified. That’s the American Dream right there: anything can happen to anyone. It’s random.”

~ Nellie (played by Catherine Tate), who stole the Sabre manager’s job from Andy on The Office, Season 8, the most prescient show ever, our true Zeitgeist

Random 1: Have you had those times when you know you need to go out, do something, but there’s no place you really feel you can be? You get an idea…no, not that. Turn around. Well, turn left. Wait. No. Just go home. No, you put on nice clothes. You have to try. For example, this evening after my work-from-home day, as a cold front moved into Queens, I thought I’d go to one of my favorite bars. Both of my two places are about ¾ of a mile away, and the winds of fool’s spring March began making me doubt my choices; so instead, I found myself randomly heading north to Queens Boulevard to the Irish Butcher Block. I reasoned, I can get fish and chips, maybe a bottle of Guinness or Smithwick’s, and be cozy at home. But when I arrived, the shop was packed; so I thought, okay, I need a walk, so I’ll walk over to my friend Violet’s shop. On arrival, I looked in the store door to see her shop was packed, and that’s fantastic for her, but I’m still not belonging anywhere. I turned around. Despite the increasing feeling that I should just go home, I walked on to my bars, as I say, despite myself. Not a stool was open, not a greeting to be had, not meant to be. Both places. Right? So I keep walking, circling back, as it turned out, to the Butcher Block, now without a line, for the fish and chips, and thence to the liquor store and Italian Rosso.

Sometimes you take a circuitous route to end up where you needed to be, but now you have had exercise and gained a fresh perspective.

Forsythia makes everything kinda hopeful.

Random 2: When I was in kindergarten, I came home one day to the smell of new carpet stretched over the first-floor asbestos black and tan tile in our little split-level house. Harvest gold industrial. One day early in its new life, the carpet by the laundry room door was damaged—not sure how, some kind of tear and a stain maybe. Around this time on TV, ca. 1969, was this advertisement for a magic fabric repair powder—it involved rubbing fibers into the powder and ironing the mixture onto damaged area, and POOF! like new. What my mom, Lynne, actually got, instead of a smooth “repair,” was a scorch mark on a new carpet they could barely afford: the mark shaped perfectly like the bottom of the iron, brown and indelible. Irreparable.

As a child, I was more afraid of the iron than anything. I have no memory of this, but my mom, Lynne, told me that whenever she set up the ironing board and brought out the iron to plug it in, I would begin screaming. Iron as Handbag, 2026. LO’H

To cover the scorch, my mom found a rug at a store somewhere, a 2’ x 3’ area rug, like a doormat, and so for all those years there was this little rug that scooted always over to the right at an angle, as we came and went through the laundry room to the back door (really a side door), and out of habit all of us just scooched the rug back to the center of the door, making sure the scorch stayed covered.

When some 20 years later my parents were able to afford to replace the carpet, this time blue plush, they also found a small complementary doormat-type rug to put in front of the laundry room. For the next decades, then, we all endured the same irritation of watching the rug scooch over as people went in and out of the doorway, each of us moving it slightly back to center. Day in, day out. Not until my mom had the first big fall in 2023 did I just roll it up and hide it (I’d been proposing its removal for years; I performed this “disappearing” act with every single area rug in every room, too, afterwards, and no one questioned). But when my mom asked, “Where’s the rug?” pointing to the area by the laundry room, I asked in return, “Mom, why was there a rug there at all?” And that’s when she realized, “Do you know what? I put it there to hide the scorch”—the scorch that disappeared with the removal of the old carpet some 30 years before.

Random 3: Do you know that story—I think it was in Reader’s Digest, or from a local paper, maybe, back when they all had a feature called “Bits ‘n’ Pieces,” and I really miss local papers, but my old Appomattox landlady recounted it to me: One Thanksgiving, a man sees his wife preparing a ham, and just before she puts it in the pan, she cuts the end of the ham off. “Why did you do that?” “I don’t know,” his wife replies, “my mother always did it.” So that man asks his mother-in-law, and she says, “I don’t know, my mother always did it.” So the man finds his wife’s grandma, sitting in a chair, explains his observation, and asks her, “Why did you cut off the end of the ham?” And she looks at him, “To fit it in the pan.”

We humans do a lot of things because we’ve always done it that way. How did it start? Why do we still do it? Unless you can answer that, you really have to question, and keep at it until you realize, “There’s no scorch mark anymore.”

Random 4: “It’s policy. The government runs on policy. Without policy it all comes apart.” Words to that effect greet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s newest deputy, Julissa Reynoso, a naturalized citizen from the Dominican Republic, by a seasoned State Department veteran, in the play Public Charge, which I saw last night at The Public Theater in New York. Things are only done a certain way, Reynosa (who co-wrote the play, with the endorsement of Clinton) is told, and no other way. In order to get a wrongly imprisoned USAID worker out of a Cuban prison, a duty charged to her by Sec. Clinton (unseen and largely unnamed), while also working to free the remaining prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Reynoso spends five years, 2009-2014, under her boss and President Obama achieving the impossible, upending business as usual, with their full support. It’s exhausting and crazy-making. The play closes with footage of President Obama’s address that the U.S. would be returning to normalized relations with Cuba, and Reynosa leaving her post to begin work on the campaign of a lifetime, the promise of our first woman president.

We all know what happened. What is happening now.

And you sit with this. And sit with this.

Random 5: I was watching a rerun of The Office tonight and not really thinking about anything, and it was the episode where Nellie simply decides she’s the new manager of Sabre (see that quote up there), and Robert California, the CEO who is all talk and no ability, just lets her do it. Jim says to the camera, “What is happening?!” And all I could think was, “I don’t know, but here we are.”

TV ratings for reality shows notwithstanding, it’s no good to shake things up just to shake ’em up—putting morons in the highest offices is never going to yield good results. People DIE. Life and death. Morality matters, ethics matters, and so does humanity: sometimes a smart woman—and smart is key, woman is key; who is a moral person—and moral is key; and who is not molded by what has always been and is also highly educated and imaginative (no small things) with a complex immigrant background (so underrated) that affords her a global perspective—and supported by reasonable and daring leaders, can to shake up a years’ long, idiotic stalemate to reconcile many factions, save some lives, and make change for the better. It’s work, and it’s hard and frustrating, totally unsung (no statues or commemorative coins), and the key to success is not to quit—because right when you think you have to give up (as my old therapist told me about psychic breakthroughs), you get the big idea.

The United States cannot survive another year on Celebrity Apprentice faking greatness, or exist in perpetuity as a weird Season 8 arc on The Office. Shit is real.

But goddamn, this country, man.

Racism. Misogyny. White male fragility. Greed. Power. All the ills. It’s all so much bullshit.

We American humans are so far out of touch with our natural world, with anything like roots, that our collective nervous breakdown must be due in large part to that loss. (I stood in Astor Place last evening en route to The Public, looking at all the dead-eyed faces of skinny NYU students with earbuds and fast fashion and too much money, and the speeding e-bikes of food delivery guys talking on cellphones, and no one is happy and no one looks present, and I’m thinking how I don’t want to perpetuate this AI bullshit world, and now what?) Hillary Clinton understood that it is through person to person connection that we change hearts and minds, and that until you change those you change nothing. I get really pissed off when liberals and progressives make fun of the notion of changing hearts and minds, and it’s deeply ironic when conservatives make fun of Hillary—what do all these lefties think Turning Points U.S.A. is all about? Reprogramming hearts and minds, people, and not for the good. Conservatives just don’t want the Libs to figure out that Hillary has been right all along.

There are some mistakes you can’t throw a rug over. Not to bludgeon this metaphor but how long have we been scooching little (law) rugs over our racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, pedophilia, greed; our history; our abuses of all kinds? It’s time to replace that carpet, and one hopes without burning down the house.

And take a fucking walk. Cults aren’t culture. See you at No Kings.

Reasons to love my neighborhood. Queens.

Road Trips: A letter for the end of the world

I awoke this morning from a dream involving peacock feathers, in a kind of thrift shop where I see a bright green minidress on a dress form, adorned with giant peacock-style feathers at the bust. I’m supposed to be gathering up all the green and peacock-inspired pieces—tulle, shoes, costume jewelry—to create an ensemble, but somehow I keep leaving everything in this shop, which is mostly in some kind of garden behind a sort of little house-turned-shop, and I keep having to return and return, as we do in dreams, unable to finish anything, odd people intruding, cousins, all conservatives, one wearing a burgundy faux fur coat with white fur trim and a hood that I had in middle school as she reads the paper while standing in a dirt-floor vestibule and I explain that I am for abortion rights.

On waking, as I do upon each waking in the past decade, I wonder how long the planet has left; AI models say 19 years at the outset before humans are extinct. And I wonder how it is 2026 and we are as a species still bombing one another, and how all these so-called geniuses with all their resources are so super-excited to hasten the end of life on our glorious pale blue dot, why that dream of total annihilation, that ruthless use of power, is so alluring, our world’s end so inevitable for them. It’s hard to get up and start each day knowing how many horrible humans are out there among us abusing, killing, raping, starving, imprisoning all the really sweet people. You know.

Yesterday I received the most beautiful thing in the mail: an actual handwritten letter from an old friend.

From the stationery (a homophone I learned to spell correctly, differentiating it from stationary, in 7th grade, and memorized because letters mattered so much to me) to the greeting to the P.S., the back-front sharing of life moments in ink in the present tense remains for me a treasure, even seeing a hand-addressed envelope in the hallway in front of the mail slot still brings a little rush of warmth.

One thing that troubled me was that this letter from Central Virginia was postmarked GREENSBORO, NC, and that postmark is ominous. Louis DeJoy, who inexplicably is still the postmaster general, has been working to ensure that local postal facilities are no longer processing mail, but gathering it up, shipping it on trucks to facilities hundreds of miles away for that postal stamp, causing delays of days and weeks. I realized that were my friend to mail in her November ballot, say, it would take over a week at best to reach the elections office in her very own town. And by then, it could be too late to be counted, since a new USPS policy states that the postmarked date no longer counts as the actual date for submission of any legal document, from tax returns to ballots. In addition, these delays mean that Americans may no longer receive time-sensitive legal notices on time, such as summonses for jury duty or traffic tickets, causing fines and even arrests.

More fodder for the private prison complex system of forced labor, I guess; more private property to seize and take from the rest of us. (The U.S. Postal Service, created by Benjamin Franklin so that Americans had a little government in their lives every day, now reflects exactly our government, doesn’t it, as in almost no governance at all. As my friend George reminds me, “We are all going to be inconvenienced to death.”)

All that from receiving a nice letter. Because nothing is nice anymore. Nothing can ever simply be anymore, that is, without deep discipline of the mind to take in the moment.

Last week an old college friend, D, came to visit with one of her grown daughters, whom I hadn’t seen since she was a toddler. Back in 1988, my friend accompanied me on a cross-country odyssey, back when you used paper maps and had no cell phones (and the sign on leaving Barstow, CA, for AZ said, “NOTHING FOR 150 MILES” and you drove onward); the entire month-long trip cost us $200, including 89¢/gallon gas for a Toyota truck that got 35 miles to the gallon; and $2.00/night camp grounds when we weren’t in the beds in the houses of relatives. Food was cheap—a full chicken dinner might be $4.95, and we could split it. On return, I made an album, photocopying the road atlas cover, the tapes, cutting out ad tag lines, headlines, and images from the local newspaper or magazines to comment on the photos.

The impetus for this trip was an invitation to the first O’Hara Family Reunion, in Nebraska; plans were thrown together; my mom, Lynne, bought me a KOA Campground Directory, which guided us to cheap accommodations. Also, I had just survived my first year of teaching, and it was my first summer off not working in any way since I was maybe 13. I don’t know how I was ever that brave. My brave friend D made it possible.

And in 2003, when I moved from Virginia to New York City, I accidentally took my box of curated collage-photo albums to my sister’s basement (instead of my parents’ house) to store, where she had a one-time-only flood that miraculously only destroyed that one cross-country trip album. (D, a practicing witch, said when I told her, “You’re welcome.”) Moldy and blurred to oblivion though it was, I didn’t have the heart to get rid of that album, but upon seeing the horror, D convinced me last week to do that—I snapped a few pages for memory first, and indeed, tossed the hunk of mildew and mold into a plastic bag and out to the trash.

I miss the intimacy of letters and albums. We live in a bizarro world of mass surveillance and public disclosure of our innermost worries and thoughts—but it’s not really new: any of us who worked in drugstores and photo-mats knows that workers kept copies of customers’ intimate pictures to share and discuss, so it’s not as if our camera photos were really private, though perhaps only our postal worker and roommates knew about our private mail from return addresses if not contents.

I remember mentioning once to a writer friend that I kept all the letters ever sent to me—I’ve told you this—and I mean all of them. I’m the keeper of the letters—and I saw her face cloud and shift to panic. What private things had she revealed to me? her face said. I’m sure nothing; I, on the other hand, was a font of confession, and ironically no one has saved letter one written by me. It’s too bad, really, as I wrote really good letters; but perhaps the confessions are best left to the landfill.

This weekend I may go into my closet and begin culling the dozens and dozens of shoeboxes filled with correspondence. On the other hand, given that we are going extinct in 19 years, I probably won’t.

And so, to start another morning at the edge of the end of the world, with love,

Miss O’

Wrecking Ball: On the American addiction to destruction

During my year of History of Theatre classes at Virginia Tech ca. 1983, Dept. Head Don Drapeau lectured about Western theater/re traditions that began in Greece, using the textbook History of Theatre (Fourth Edition, by the time I took the class) by Oscar G. Brockett. From the Greek and Roman multi-purpose arenas, we’d make our way through the Dark Ages to the Middle Ages and the Pageant Plays, where you’d come to realize that all theaters are essentially churches, which is to say, churches are theaters, built for audience and players. By the Renaissance, special buildings called theatres, (from the Greek amphitheatron, or “place with spectators all around”) were being constructed solely for the purpose of the thing that is a play. And at some point in a lecture, Don would intone, speaking about every theatre from the Rose to the Old Globe, “And it burned down.” Eventually, by the end of the second quarter, we students would complete his thought for him.

By the end of the third quarter, we could have changed it to “And it was demolished.”

This edition stopped being handed down with me, as I knew I would be a teacher and could use it. I never did get back any theater book I loaned to starving theatre majors, either because the concept of building a personal library didn’t occur to them or else it did and they kept them; or maybe they gave my books to someone else, or possibly sold them back to the Virginia Tech bookstore, or threw them out—as Americans do. I still miss my copy of Renaissance Drama, Kelly.

As a theater-going New Yorker, you start memorizing the locations of all the major houses, Shubert Alley, the re-namings of long-standing places (The Brooks Atkinson is now The Lena Horne, for example); you absorb the history, how a row of old, beautiful theaters, including the legendary Morosco, was demolished to make way for the Marriott Marquis Hotel—and no hotel could look more impersonal or corporate, including the fast the glass elevators that speed you to the top floors. (Its only redeeming feature, the ready availability of restrooms on the fourth floor, is now a thing of the past, the doors locked. Because America is punitive by design.)

I have been revisiting theater history this week reading Historic Photos of Broadway: New York Theater, 1850-1970 by Leonard Jacobs, published in 2008. The book was given to me not long ago by my friend, Richard, a Broadway stage manager, when he saw me reading it at his house. (Lest I think he was being overly generous (or trying to dump a mediocre item), he told me that the year the book came out, two different people had gifted him a copy.) In photo after photo, you see old-time theater greats and photos of the theaters where they played, and the building narrative runs something like, “Built in 1926, demolished in 1936.” These stunning marble edifices, intricately carved, doodads all over, stunning interiors, painted ceilings (and you have to imagine the colors, as the photos are black and white)—each one gone inside of ten, twenty, or thirty years to make way for a concrete and glass office building.

So not only are the magnificent vessels of the performing arts built and demolished, when they were constructed at their height in the 1890s to the 1920s, America was both Gilded and also cultured; and then they all came down, the buildings and the people, in a crash with the Crash. Cue the wrecking balls.

The business of America is business. Really lousy business.

Page after page of these historic photos (along with captions heavy with dates and commentary, but oddly inconsistent in things like addresses or anecdotes), you see that only a few of these theater palaces survive and are still in use. “It was demolished.” And it got me wondering about the Western penchant for demolition—from Trump’s midnight teardown of White House East Wing and the coming teardown of The [Trump] Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, to Israel’s U.S.-funded thermal bombing Gaza and the coming similar Israeli-U.S. treatment of Iran: what is it about Western culture that cannot bear the idea of anything as it is, taking its own time, whether it’s civilization or a meadow or The Morosco?

I think back to “It burned down.” With every innovation, from candles to gas lamps to limelight—theater owners saw money to be made by closing the roofs and playing both day and night; and with every chance of money to be made comes the risk of imminent destruction. Does this habit of money and tech rewire our brains? I think yes.

According to an article a friend sent me, the corporate-imposed use (by Microsoft and Google, etc.) of things like Copilot and ChatGPT and AI is also rewiring our brains to the point that very, very soon indeed humans will not be able to construct any original thought into a coherent sentence—even just the finishing of a text thought or correcting our spelling, via apps we didn’t ask for, is retraining us to rely on technology—demolishing us, as it were, to make way for data centers.

To what end? I ask this a lot.

All the nature, all the artistic work of architecture (as was), demolished by the Trumps of the world to make way for Towers in homage to themselves, wiping out what was, our history, our beauty, for ego. And we lose knowledge, too. Walking around Queens last weekend, my friend Cathy and I ran into our friends Lisa and Jodi, and Lisa remarked that something I once said about bricks got her paying attention to the way our many brick buildings are constructed. We pointed to the building across the street and showed Cathy. Here’s a photo to explain:

Note the running bond pattern is interrupted every five rows to place bricks turned the other direction. There’s a name for this, and I could look it up, and I used to know it, but you can find it if it interests you. It’s Sunday.

And I learned about this method of brick construction, done for stability, from my teacher friend Tommy many years ago. And from my friend Jim, who learned it from an architect friend, I learned that all the high-up doodads and sculptural features on fancy city buildings were created for the viewing pleasure of the people on the upper floors across the street. You know, with design and thought and attention to detail. I think about all these arts—carvings and mortar and bricks and marble and doodads in service to beauty as one enters a building devoted to other arts—and marvel at the cavalier attitude businessmen take to paying to demolish all this craft for the sake of a hideous concrete and glass tower to make money; I equally marvel that there are businesses devoted to doing this demolition without blinking. Money money.

Sitting on the 7 Train to and from Manhattan last evening (and the night return) to see a play, I was among the few people daydreaming or observing; everyone else was on their phones or listening to something in their earbuds, and I got to thinking about all the ways we are demolishing our innermost selves so someone we will never know can make a shit ton of money.

I never thought I’d see a performance of a new play written by Wallace Shawn and directed by Andre Gregory. Really involving. If you haven’t seen My Dinner with Andre, I recommend it. Like Shawn’s drama characters, Gregory talks about experiences and ideas, and people almost never talk about things like that anymore. When I eavesdrop, I mostly hear about meal services and TV shows people are streaming; consumption is our modern life.

One thing about this technology: I’m really glad that spellcheck often still misses “teh” and “aobut” for automated fixes. That will change. But I prefer to make my own corrections, and take my own daydream subway rides, and walk whenever possible to my destination—to feel that I still own my own mind, my own body, that I have a choice of experience and destiny. Until I, too, am demolished.

Sending love, somehow, on a Sunday morning from Queens,

Miss O’

To My Sister Virginia

Woolf works to guide us

In the late years of her life, ca. 1936-1938, writer Virginia Woolf was experimenting with a text that combined the novel form with the essay form. The result was, in the end, two books, the novel The Years (which began its life as The Pargiters), and the essay Three Guineas. I’ve read many of Woolf’s novels half a dozen times each—Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, the Waves, Orlando—I’ve even read Flush twice (the biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, and it’s hilarious). I’ve read Jacob’s Room three times, I think, but the first time was the best, and Between the Acts at least twice; and the essay A Room of One’s Own I think four times through—I just finished it again recently and I think I finally got it all. It only took me 40 years.

Curiously, I have read her first two novels, The Voyage Out and Night and Day only once—they aren’t that interesting, though I might change my mind. The same goes for the The Years (though, ironically and not surprisingly, as it was a straight family chronicle, it was Woolf’s best selling book). I’ve also read Three Guineas only once think—all of that at Oxford in 1992, when I studied Woolf as part of my master’s. Be impressed. (I’ve also read her short fiction, only “Kew Gardens” and “The Mark on the Wall” standing out in memory.)

I have a brilliant writer friend who thinks Woolf writes the worst fiction known to man. I could not disagree more. But this same writer does not disagree with me that Virginia Woolf had one of the finest minds of the 20th century, and I’d say any century. As I’ve probably told you, for me Virginia Woolf renders the world precisely the way I experience it. Do with that what you will.

Today I ran across this post from HistoryCoolKids on Instagram, and it made me recall how important her pacifist essay Three Guineas (1938) is in the Woolf pantheon—that’s the essay the post refers to—and also how aware Woolf was that men are fucking everything up (this was around the beginning of the next great world war, England once again at the center):

The post text:

Teaching my Oxford class was tutor Jeri Johnson, herself a James Joyce scholar who for only that one summer taught both Joyce and Woolf (in separate courses); curious as to why she would be drawn to such polar opposite modernist writers, I did some research, in the time before Google, availing myself of the school library where I was teaching, and saw quickly that the writers were exact contemporaries, 1882-1941. How about that? (Note: if you want to blow away a professor, show up with a little tidbit like that and set the stage for your A.) I also learned that Woolf detested Joyce’s Ulysses, finding it vulgar (she’s not wrong, what with all the mentions of snot, for example, and masturbation); and the most important thing about Joyce’s book for me is that it inspired Woolf to write Mrs. Dalloway in answer: one day in a life in London, a woman’s life, in response to one day in the life of a man in Dublin. Both texts have richness, but Woolf’s is not designed to keep scholars arguing for a century, and that alone speaks to her quote up there.

When Jeri assigned Three Guineas to read, I entered class the next day filled with ideas, bookmarked pages, notes in the margins. The essay’s premise is that Woolf has been asked for three guineas (pounds) to give in donation, one guinea each per charity, and she’s deciding which cause deserves her money. In the course of essay, she arrives at the conclusion that her final guinea can never go to supporting men taking us to war. My four classmates (this being an Oxford-style tutorial affair), all women, declared the essay a failure and Woolf a “shrill” woman. I sat in silence. They went on about how “now was not the time to call for peace,” “Hitler on the rise,” etc. They were utterly dismissive, and all discussion was shut down. Jeri looked at me.

“Lisa,” she said, “you’ve been awfully quiet.” I looked up and stated, “I loved it.” Jeri started to smile, and thus encouraged, I went into my rapture: “This is a woman who knows she doesn’t have a lot of time…” and I began flipping to my bookmarks and reading my evidence. As I type this for you, I can feel myself in that little Oxford office, aged 26, sitting on the floor, speaking with a young woman’s ardor. No one else said anything. Class was over, Jeri assigned us something, and I was the last to file out. “Thank you,” she said, quietly. “You’re welcome,” I said, and left feeling that I’d found my own way and stood my ground intellectually for the first time in my academic life. That’s pretty cool.

We are living in an age where the lies of men, the vulgarities of men, the warmongering and whore mongering and shit-peddling of men must finally end, or we all go down and forever.

Quote from Three Guineas, the button I wear to every protest.

This evening I’m embarking on a reread of both The Years and Three Guineas, because the mind of Woolf ca. 1936, when she began her work—seeing the writing on the wall in Germany—reminds me of myself and my female friends in 2026. Nearly a century on, men are still running and fucking up everything. I need fortification. We don’t have a lot of time.

Should you wish to start your own Woolf journey, as I think I’ve mentioned before, I recommend Mrs. Dalloway or Orlando—definitely not To the Lighthouse or The Waves; though I think they really are her masterpieces, it’s so hard to see why without a little primer. I speak from experience, take it or leave it.

Woolf continues to inspire. The composer Max Richter and choreographer Wayne MacGregor created Woolf Works, which I saw on video during Covid from The Royal Ballet in Britain, and live in 2024 in New York. The only one of the three ballets that really works is based on Mrs. Dalloway, and I mention this because I’d love to see what women artists would do with the same material. You know. (I made this watercolor to show my friends who recommended the piece:)

Covid creation by LO’H, for those in the know. You come, too.

Sending you love and Woolf inspiration as antidote to all the maleness madness. Let me know how you get on.