Month: March 2026

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.