Author: Miss O'

Miss O' is the pen and stage name of writer and performer and spinster Lisa O'Hara. Miss O' was an American high school English and drama teacher for 15 years, and she appreciates her freedom to leave it behind for a new life in Queens, NY. Her eBook, Easier to Live Here: Miss O' in New York City, is still available, after ten years, on Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook. Her stage show, The Miss O' Show Teacher's Edition: Training Pants, will someday arrive in small works-in-progress venues to be announced, maybe; and in the meantime the work continues.

On What Occasion Do You Lie?

Telling truths on Presidents Day

“I cannot tell a lie.”

~ George Washington, First American President

Ironically, this famous quote is itself a lie (how American), but more on that later.

The magazine Vanity Fair (to which I no longer subscribe) includes, as the last page of each issue, The Proust Questionnaire, a set of questions originally asked and answered by novelist Marcel Proust and now used to learn more about the globe’s favorite obsession, celebrities. The questionnaire has some interesting questions, and some shallow ones, but the answers can be revealing. I’m often struck, for example, by the way powerful men, even decent ones like George Clooney, answer #12: What is the quality you most like in a man? “Loyalty.” As a woman I read this as, Truth telling is a deal breaker. As for #13, What is the quality you most like in woman? men generally respond, “Patience” or some other subservient thing. It’s interesting, if limited.

Interesting, If Limited could be the title of my memoir.

Walking around the neighborhood, I found myself thinking of Question #9, which is, On what occasion do you lie? Often the celebrity of the month who has chosen this particular question among the many, will respond, “To spare someone’s feelings.” Fair enough.

But speaking as a fairly honest person who has lied on numerous occasions while also valuing truth, I wondered if any of the situations in which I lied had something in common. I’d like to say something pithy, see, when it’s time for my Vanity Fair moment, so let me note just a few examples, categorize them, and see if I can find the common ground.

1. Once in second grade, Mrs. Angle—I’ve told you this story—asked us after nap time with our heads down on our desks if anyone had a dream they’d like to share. I raised my little hand and got up in front of the class and, making it all up (obviously) to entertain my friends, described how we all went to Egypt to see the tomb of Tutankhamen. I pointed, “Juanita was there,” and again, “Ingrid was there,” and Mrs. Angle snapped, “You’re lying. Sit down.”

2. On a high school field trip during my sophomore year, to take the singers and pit orchestra to a neighboring high school to perform scenes from South Pacific as a promotion for our production, our sponsors, Mrs. Combs and Mr. Carnohan, realized they’d forgotten to send home permission slips with us kids. Only when the bus driver asked if they had them did they realize. I stepped up quickly, “Give me ten minutes.” I had everyone write out a permission slip on paper we all collected from someone’s notebook, and I signed each slip in chameleon-like handwriting. Mrs. Combs looked stunned, but she took my pile and off we went.

3. When I’m late for something, like work, I have blamed the subway (and have been caught out by a colleague and supervisor on the same line) because I’d rather not say, “I have IBS and had to run back home halfway to the stop because I needed to shit again.” (Finally, I just told the truth. No one asked after that.)

4. I once helped make a company-wide Answer Key set, compiled for the whole floor of my 2 Penn Plaza office, when this one president took over and, to prove his power, spent easily $100K to create something like 30 separate “learning modules” complete with “tests” on corporate “life” and business, modules that included short films, voice overs, and reading material on slide presentations, and if you didn’t get all the answers correct on each test, you had to start over, the whole module. We had massive publishing deadlines at the time, our nerves hanging by a thread. To what end are we doing this? But your job was on the line. A few of us—no doubt my idea—began printing out all our 100% test answer sheets which we labeled by module, punched holes, and stuck them in an unmarked three-ring binder. and set it on a file cabinet in our pod We didn’t even hide it. Eventually even our supervisors, to say nothing of executives and vice presidents, began ambling and ultimately marching over our pod to get the book, because 1) these tests were useless to our work; 2) the president was doing it to be a dick; 3) he would be out on his ass soon enough (they always are) once he was eligible for that golden parachute—we endured a period of a few years in which a succession of dicks who were pushed out of one company division and over to ours until they could retire. It was not fun. And yet, our important work—work that corporate didn’t in the least understand—somehow went on, great as usual. Hmmm. Who’s the parasite, Elon? (And how do I really feel?)

5. When the famous Westway Diner on 9th Avenue was taken over by new management maybe six or eight years ago—all the old-school career waiters replaced, the desk staff and chefs gone, the classic booths and tiles plowed under for white and gray blah—I happened in to check it out, and in addition to the place being bereft of atmosphere, the food sucked. “How did you like it?” the aggressive manager asked me about inedible spinach pie, which was a block of bone dry phyllo with almost no filling. “Mmmm,” I said, not wanting the poor new chef to get canned. Let someone else tell them; consider this a funeral donation. (It’s since recovered.)

What do all these occasions have in common? Well, they are lies of convenience, I guess, trying to smooth something over, or using deceit to help out friends or struggling folks; on reflection, I tell few lies just to save my ass. That’s how I was brought up. But I’m not stupid enough to believe that always being honest is smart. As my friend’s Montenegrin immigrant father used to say, “Honest and stupid are two brothers.”

I’ll tell you what the lies don’t have in common: No lives are in the balance for the telling of them. While I don’t condone lying or deceit as a lifestyle, sometimes lies save lives, and you have to keep your hand in. Ask the enslaved; ask women being beaten by abusive husbands; ask Tina Turner running away from Ike. Ask Jews during the Holocaust. Ask the French Resistance. And as we are entering a different era now, hearkening back to those dark times, we all may need to reset our moral compasses. We are back to Nazi Germany, friends, and “truth” for them, ain’t truth for us.

Thinking about coded language and other “lies,” and this being Presidents Day, I recalled a Chaucer class I took in graduate school 30 years ago, and my professor, John Fleming of Princeton, wanted to teach the class about Medieval iconography—you know, the images in all those beautifully illuminated manuscripts with the stories in calligraphy and the illustrations in gold leaf and lapis blue. Those illustrations, we learned, were included not only for their beauty but to guide the illiterate, because unless you were nobility or clergy, you didn’t read. So, what did the images mean? You see a lion, a rose, stuff like that. How would anyone get a whole story from a picture?

To demonstrate, Prof. Fleming drew these images in simple lines on the chalkboard:

“What is this story?” Fleming asked. My classmates, attending the Bread Loaf School of English from all over the country and the world, sat dumbfounded. I couldn’t believe it. See, I talked a lot, and I was practicing restraint, but finally I raised my hand.

“It’s George Washington and the cherry tree. I cannot tell a lie, Father, I chopped down that cherry tree.”

The class turned to me and looked at me like I had two heads. Fleming barked a happy laugh.

I explained to the still-lost class that I grew up in Virginia, up the highway from Parson Weems’s house, Weems being the man who wrote the fable about wee George, and a few miles down from Mount Vernon.

Fleming then went on to explain that this is a perfect example of how and why iconography—the use of simple symbolic images to represent a whole story—works in places that share a common culture.

To learn more this Presidents Day about this fable, you can check out the Carter Museum and learn about Grant Wood’s portrait, pulling back the curtain on the myth. In 1800, Weems published The Life of Washington, which is well-known as the source for many myths about the first president. Written just a year after Washington’s death, it includes the story of six-year-old George admitting to chopping down a cherry tree and another about Washington praying at Valley Forge.

Who chopped down that cherry tree? asks George’s father, according to Parson Weems, who wrote, “Young George bravely said, ‘I cannot tell a lie… I did cut it with my hatchet.’ Washington’s father embraced him and declared that his son’s honesty was worth more than a thousand trees.”

Why create this myth about an already mythological figure, even by 1800? I guess to impress upon America’s youth the importance of honesty. But what to do when you learn the story is in fact made up?

Growing up as I say, along the Richmond Highway between the home of Parson Weems and Washington’s home of Mount Vernon, I learned this fable in elementary school, but I never learned about Washington, the enslaver. Not in high school, not in college. I remember a California friend visiting Mount Vernon with me and saying, “I thought this was just a myth,” meaning the whole plantation, the first American president, all of it. And it’s easy to see how anyone not from the historical grounds of colonial America might feel that way, or wouldn’t be shocked to see a slave auction block landmarked in Fredericksburg or Williamsburg, given the American tendency to mythologize the successes and sweep the ugly truths under our antique hooked rugs.

And really, the more we keep digging, and the more lenses we train on our history, the more truths we uncover, the more lies we reveal—the more interesting and complex and real our history becomes. It’s discomfiting, sure, horrifying at times, but isn’t it exciting, too? Isn’t truth worth seeking? How else to make this nation truly free?

This is where we turn to our artists.

To explore perhaps America’s greatest “Lives of the Presidents” cover-ups, the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his enslaved “mistress” Sally Hemings, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks premiered her play Sally and Tom at The Public Theater last year. The premise of the play is a community theater putting on a play about these historical figures while the leads are in a relationship. I loved the show, and I was fortunate enough to be there on a talk-back night. In attendance that night were several of the descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings and their families, as verified by DNA. I couldn’t believe I was having this chance to witness history. To watch as these family members meet one another after the show (many were sitting in the row in front of me) and walk up onto the stage—the set’s back wall covered in all of their names in the final reveal—to take photos with their phones, made me weep. (I think it would be a fascinating way to end the actual play.) It was wondrous, too seeing truth all up there like that. The theater was filled with love in the midst of revelations. That’s what art does.

Miss O’ outside The Public Theater, April, 2024.

And I think also of that incredible painting by Titus Kaphar, “The Myth of Benevolence,” offering another way that art can reveal a deep truth in a way no historical record ever can, exposing long-hidden damage and forcing us to confront it. (Click on the link to see the entire painting and learn its story.)

A whole story from a picture. American iconography.

Detail, Titus Kaphar, “Behind the Myth of Benevolence” https://www.culturetype.com/2018/03/28/titus-kaphar-and-ken-gonzales-day-explore-unseen-narratives-in-historic-portraiture-in-new-national-portrait-gallery-exhibition/

On what occasion do you lie? I look at the American story, then and now, and it’s seeded with lies and corruption, so many lies, you have to wonder, Can it ever come clean? How do we answer for it? These are the questions we all should ask and answer now. If we don’t, whom do we think we’re protecting?

On what occasion do you lie? Ask Gil Scott Heron, famous for saying “the revolution will not be televised,” meaning it happens inside us, speaks volumes about the impact of lies in the linked poem; and Kendrick Lamar, whose brilliantly coded and performed all-Black Superbowl Halftime Show blew me away. The enslaved lived in world of code. They had to lie about learning to read, for godsakes. Pretend to go along, to get along.

On what occasion do you lie? Ask women who have been sexually assaulted and been made to keep quiet or lose their careers. Ask the men who keep pretending nothing happened. Ask Sally Hemings.

On what occasion do you lie? There are real reasons to lie, moral, ethical reasons. To protect the ones we love. To save our neighbors. We are having to think hard about that now.

Republican lawmakers (that’s rich) want AOC arrested for teaching Americans and immigrants their rights. Photo by Miss O’ in her Queens neighborhood.

Because let’s face it: here in the United States, we are in a crisis of government amorality. We have a lying Republican party (no more rule of law); a lying president (pick a campaign promise, and yes, Project 2025 was the plan all along); a lying vice president (his autobiography exposed as a sham); a lying Supreme Court (see Roe v. Wade, which all declared, under oath, “settled law”); and liars heading every cabinet position (no, trans people are not the cause of America’s problems; and Putin is not America’s friend, Tulsi). We have liars in the Department of Justice and Homeland Security (immigrants are not remotely the cause of most crime; being brown is not a crime). We have liars heading the F.B.I. (the Democrats are not the enemies of America). It’s all lying all the time, now, and their truths are even worse. The freedom of Western Europe is now in the balance, as Vice President J.D. Vance admonished the “values” of those democratic nations this weekend, in essence praising the rise of fascism in France and Germany and also capitulating to Russia’s desire for empire. On the campaign trail, Vance said “democracy” but meant, we know now, “totalitarianism” (Europe is not America’s enemy, nor are Panama, Canada, or Greenland; our actual enemies are transparently heading our own government.)

Past and present collide: JD Vance on his brown wife; I’ve heard Vance refer to their children as “her” kids. Look at the mental gymnastics and self-delusion of Vance, who denies his wife and children, and smiles.

To think that all of today’s stuff started with asking a simple question.

Identifying lies is not the same as responding to the world that supports those lies. There’s a very cool blog on Substack called The Pamphleteer by Lady Libertie, and she is focused on how we negotiate this new era. Check out “So You’ve Been Invaded: a French Resistance Guide for the U.S.” Pretending comes with the territory of survival. Marcel Marceau, for example, as a teenager pretended to be a camp leader, while his real job was to smuggle Jewish children across the border to freedom; he used the art of mime to teach the children silence as they walked. It’s not really lying if it’s saving lives, and the people you are lying to are venal.

Happy Presidents Day in America, 2025, everybody!

Sending love,

Miss O’

The Pieces We Are

Fragmentation in America

I am a 60-year-old American white woman who has been steadily listening to Nina Simone and Miriam Makeba for months now, and today find that I have turned my Apple music subscription to Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. White girl voices are often too breathy and whiny for my taste (so, bless Adele), and the lyrical complaints about girls and boys and coffee date ghosting don’t exactly feel vital or resonant, but there is something compelling about Roan.

It’s good to know I can still be surprised by an artist, especially a white one, because lately I’m not surprised my much else white people do.

Anyone in America who works somewhere has probably been “acquired” by “a firm” of some sort for their “portfolio”; and as a result, we all of us feel this chapter of American democracy, as was, all too keenly: the Musk acquisition of America. I’ve read that the Republican voters who work in civil service never thought that the people they supported for office—that is, the venture capitalists and hedge fund managers and private equity firms—would actually strip the government and its Constitution and sell it for parts, and fire them, but they voted for Donald “You’re Fired” Trump despite all the evidence and have found out why he’s been bankrupt six times and still standing. Musk had swooped in and destroyed Twitter and it meant nothing to these voters, either. What did they think? Well, unlike Captain Renault in Casablanca, “a poor corrupt official” who knows full well how the game is played when he says, “I’m shocked, shocked to find gambling going on here” as he collects his winnings—these earnest civil servants living in their paper pushing D.C. bubble lack a social safety net moral compass. When you think life is only money, only “savings,” you may be missing, I don’t know, a heart. Or basic life experience. (And they are about to find out what unemployment looks like when there’s no money for them to claim, and no jobs to be found except the ones all those poor, now-deported undocumented people did. Godspeed.)

For anyone who needs a personal testimony of this process, the publishing house I work for was taken over, the first time, by finance people who quickly eliminated the Editorial Services Group (ESG) because they didn’t know what ESG meant. And they never asked us before handing out the pink slips and severance packages. The ESG, as it turned out, were the COPY EDITORS and FACT CHECKERS for our textbooks. Our product. Our source of revenue. And even after learning this, the financial overlords just shrugged. Who needs copy that is correct and makes sense in educational materials for America’s students? Who will really notice? $$$ (Now I do my job and their job.)

These are, after all, people who don’t believe in textbooks, obviously; we now formally live in a nation of capitalists who don’t value education because somehow they think they learned everything (and they think, everything) through osmosis.

Cue today’s lethal gem of a typical private equity business slash move:

There’s not an American office worker in existence, or factory worker, or cashier, for that matter, who didn’t read that headline and nod.

Why do you need refrigerators? It’s a grocery store. No more refrigerators.

That kind of thing. Only now our entire nation’s security, health and safety, and economy are in the hands of, quite frankly, money fiends devoid of vision, purpose, or shame, let alone the “common sense” Trump claims to have. (Emerson called common sense “genius dressed in plain clothes.” Take a memo.)

In another example, I read that some 1.7 million HOMES around the country are vacant, sitting empty since being acquired by private equity firms, either for the land or the tax write-offs, with no interest in the communities in which the houses sit. Freeing these homes to be sold to people could end the housing crisis, maybe. At this rate we’ll never know. $$$?

My go-to comfort viewing during all this mess has been rewatching the 2019 documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, like, a dozen times. I read a review that referred to the documentary as “flat,” and it occurs to me that it’s hard for the newer critic folks to enjoy being brought fully into a world as thoughtfully as this film brings you into a teacher and book creator’s life. The subject, Nobel Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison, is as great a subject as a literate viewer might want, unless what you want is a subject like Hemingway, who beat his four wives and fought to the death in wars and bars; or Pablo Picasso, who screwed two women on the same day and then painted them both, as a habit. I’ll take Morrison’s strong sense of self, her moral compass, unflashy living, artistry, deep humanity, and humor, thanks. And she has great literary company for additional commentary. It’s all about the love of language, and the way we use language to tell about life.

Morrison recalls a time in her early childhood where her sister was teaching her letters, and they would use pebbles to scratch the letters on the sidewalk. One day they saw a new word down the block, and they began copying, F…U…, and suddenly her mother ran out of the house and yelled at them, they were crying, they didn’t know what they’d done. In that moment, Morrison says, “I learned, words have power.” (I had a similar experience when a neighbor up the street taught tiny me and my brother Pat, “Eenie, meenie, minee, moe, catch a n***er by the toe.” Not knowing that word, I substituted one I did know, but when I used that word within earshot of my mother, it sounded bad, too, and I got yelled at. So I tried, “Eenie, meeie, minee, moe, catch a quarter by the toe.” Because I couldn’t say “nickel” anymore. My mother, realizing what she thought she’d heard, said that was fine. Even though coins don’t have toes. I learned that language can surprise you, that language is invention.)

I bought this latest notebook at McNally’s on 8th Street yesterday.
My first desire for this notebook, after placing impressions from all my rubber stamps on the inside cover, was to write all my letter forms and numbers. And it really got me into a sense memory of how much work it took to learn penmanship, to practice spacing, use the lines, to be able to form words to communicate. And I was impressed with my young self. I really was. Education is wonderful.

The opening credits for the film show an artist putting together an ever-changing collage of black and white photos of Morrison’s face, pieces from the many stages of her life, along with patterned paper, to jazz music, and I could watch that over and over just by itself.

From Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. Art by Mickalene Thomas

But on this day of Black History Month, I want to share this observation Morrison makes about her growing up in Lorain, Ohio, a background woven throughout the film to create a familiar texture, one that grounds the artist in a relatable experience for most of us. “It was a melting pot, it really was,” Morrison says of the Blacks, Italians, Poles, and other working-class migrants who came to this steel town along Lake Erie, where “there was no shame in being poor.” Having enough to get by, pay the bills, have a roof, meals, your people—you know, you were good. (I grew up that way, to start. My parents were working class and moved to the middle class, and it was a big deal; values started changing, more materialism, fitting in, all that. Poverty stood out. As a nation of billionaire worshipers, we need to think on that.)

But more interesting to me this time is when she says that she had come to realize that the melting pot, “the cauldron”—and here she makes the pot with the hands—“is Black people. We are the pot.”

The United States of America would not exist at all without the slave labor of Black people, and we know that; and more than that, there would not be a culture without Black people, or at least not a culture I’d want to live in. Along with our Indigenous roots, Black music, dance, energy, love, drive, gospel, wisdom, persistence; Black love, righteousness, and willingness to throw their bodies at justice, at life, to boycott the bus lines of Montgomery, Alabama, for thirteen months—all this holds the rest of the (white) country together, makes this a democratic nation, and one I can stand to live in, if not be always proud to live in. Morrison’s late life understanding that Black people were the holders of what was melting in that pot, that they were the pot, hit me hard when I watched the documentary again last night. They were our models for the fights for justice.

I read this on Friday morning on the Instagram account of my favorite trans performer, 2024 McArthur Fellow Justin Vivian Bond. I went to the Stonewall website several times, where they also removed the “Q,” and when I scrolled down and it said, “Was this information helpful?” I chose NO, and a box asked for tips. Oh, I gave some tips. “Where’s the T? Where’s the Q? For shame.” Times 10.

On Friday, which I’d taken off to have a four-day mini break, I’d planned to spend the cold winter day at the Met Museum but instead took a detour to the Trans Rights Rally at the Stonewall National Monument at Christopher Street. I want to be an ally. Standing with all these people, where it all began, is a little surreal. “Let’s go get coffee,” one person said to a partner part way through, checking his phone. Stonewall made that possible—to just live your life.

And really, face it, without gay men, there is no Hollywood, no theater, no fashion, no clubs, no fun. Without lesbians there is no feminism, no suffrage. These are small examples, broad strokes, but you see what I mean.

American rock music—our greatest export—has its roots in American Indigenous music as well as African music. It’s not that there are no contributions by white artists, it’s just that this country would be unrecognizable, and without doubt way less interesting or dynamic, if left only to cisgender, straight whites. (Lawrence Welk, anyone? At least there’d be no Kid Rock, what with rap off his radar.) Watch what Trump does to the Kennedy Center, if you can. You know it’s cringe.

The ironic wit and hijinks of The Onion and improv theater notwithstanding, white culture has lately been elbowing out any good stuff in order to put that glaring spotlight on capitalism, our god; private equity, individualism, willful ignorance, winner take all, white supremacy, oh, and fuck you, parasite, should there be a fuck left to give. If you see what I mean. And porn. And rape. And brews for bros.

Time to melt that into the pot. And keep it melted.

Meanwhile, keep the faith, show up, find the joy somehow. That’s what I think today. I’m trying to listen to more music. Dance. And you might watch The Pieces I Am, especially if you feel like all this fragmentation of America is making you fall to pieces. It’s so hopeful. And read Beloved.

Love,

Miss O’

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” ~ Virginia Woolf, paraphrased. Blue button and “Yes Now Right Now” button by Lisa DiPetto and available on Etsy. I had really hoped my Love trumps hate button would be a relic by now. P.S. Red lipstick was a sign of resistance against Nazis, fyi. Nous continuons.

What’s Not Lost in Translation

Moments in my chaotic New York City week

So all the ick news first, aside from all the Musk-Trump criminal dismantling of every living institution in America so that it’s close to unrecognizable (taking over the Kennedy Center? The National Archives? closing what Department?), I learned at work this week that the two editors I supervise applied for a transfer to another (lately resurrected) department where they’d previously worked because they can do what they are best at there (I choose to believe it’s not about me) and got it, and that I will have to finish a huge project probably alone, the timing being what it is; then, at my ophthalmologist’s office for a checkup, I learned that not only am I at the beginning (and still reversible) stages of diabetic retinopathy, but also that I owe an outstanding balance of nearly $500 (of deductible-meeting crap) from visits over the past four years because their billing department never sent me the bills; and then I learned from my CPA that my company inexplicably failed to take out the correct amount of tax (and all week I’ve tried to correct it for this year, but the system doesn’t work, and we no longer have humans working in HR (take that in) and I am screaming into screens) and so instead of getting a refund, I in fact owe some $1,500; and the tendinitis in my write-hand (punny ha ha) wrist is so bad still after three months, medicines, and PT, that I would have to spring for a cortisone shot (sweet, sweet relief after the injection site pain and, obviously, the bill). Poor fucking me.

Thank you, internet.

But one day this week—I think it was the eye appointment day, Wednesday, when I returned home with dilated eyes and shock at hemorrhaging money—on the way into the city, a Black female conductor announced at every stop (because the N-W-R-Q lines still do not have recorded voices to announce stops, and I love that) something to this effect: “Ladies and gentlemen, let the passengers off first, let’s help each other out, everybody, let the people off first before you try to get on. Move into the middle, people, help everyone out, we’re all together here.” Love her heart. On the way back to Queens that same day, a Black male conductor did much the same, adding on occasion, “It’s not about the price of groceries, everybody, just help each other out here and move all the way into the car.” This same conductor also used the intercom to explain the location of every staircase, connection, and elevator at every single stop. A total doll.

And if you are like me, you can’t help but look up and down the train car, men, women, children, every color and shape and gender and age and religion and background and profession, staring into phones, or not; bundled up, world weary, and it hits you all over again that the reason “white middle America” is afraid of brown and black shadows is because they literally have no idea how New York works. It’s not perfect, never that, but it works. Look at us. Us. Right here in this train car, crowded, or not, for miles of stops along our way. Not yelling at or killing each other. All of us just being.

Also in my travels, I found myself thinking about a poet friend who lives in a rural area, who years ago, when I mentioned how much I loved the movie Lost in Translation could only grunt in disgust. When I asked why, she said of the lead characters, “All they did was squander an opportunity to see Japan.” I had to think for a second, because I was remembering the filming of Bill Murray’s whisky commercial, the Tokyo karaoke bar, the hotel bar nights, Scarlett Johannson’s quiet excursion to a Japanese garden and learning flower arranging, and of course the hilarious trip to the ER so Bill Murray can get Scarlett’s broken toe seen to—all these relationships and stories they will have to tell about, or not, when they return home. What did my friend mean, “squandered”? I started thinking. I guess another view is they didn’t really do all that much…and then it hit me. I said, not at all angry, but with a sense of discovery, “You’ve never traveled outside the country, have you?” She looked at me suspiciously, and slowly shook her head, as if her response to a movie shouldn’t depend on having had the experience. More to the point, though, she had almost never, within or out of the country, traveled alone. And there it is.

What was lost in translation for her in watching Lost in Translation is the feeling of sudden paralysis brought on by the jetlag stupor you feel combined with being quickly overstimulated in a new place while on no sleep, while being both excited by the prospects and daunted by selecting the best thing to do right now. The one universal is a bed (never one you can check into before 3:00 PM) and a bar or cafe, and heading to either one can give you a chance to sort of recover your wits (if you know how to manage the currency), but when you are alone with no one to bounce ideas off of, being in a new city, whatever the language, can be pretty isolating. One time, visiting London, I spent nearly one entire first day just sitting alone on a bench in Tavistock Square, where Virginia and Leonard Woolf had lived (in a no longer existing building, bombed out in WWII), underdressed (a cold day for summer) and disoriented, and in those days, a teetotaler. I could barely make myself try to find a place to have tea. If I did eat or have tea, I don’t remember. I remember a white-gray sky, damp chill air, and just watching people against green trees and grass and gray buildings.

Did I squander my first day in London? Not at all. Oddly, that first day of “doing nothing” is still the one I remember most vividly and fondly, whatever the discomfort and confusion. I was there, in the heart of London, on my own, unremarkable, on an ordinary day. Not bad.

As a result of my many NYC train treks this week, it also dawned on me that perhaps the reason I needed to leave Facebook, finally, was that my life in New York can be one of overstimulation even on the dullest days, and that Facebook had become more overstimulation, not sure which way to look, who I’m forgetting to check in on, that sort of thing. Maybe I’m just not wired for all that anymore. I know that many people can simply sit on a virtual Facebook bench and do nothing, or idly and dispassionately watch the goings on, not unlike I did in Tavistock Square or Scarlett and Bill did in Tokyo. You do you, as the kids say. However we engage, or don’t, we are all in it together, so move to the middle of car and let everybody onto the train. And remember to give people their space (remarkably, New Yorkers do know how to give you yours, even by a fraction of an inch, and if only the whole country could cotton on, that would be great). After all, everyone here with you is simultaneously present in a pubic place and also living a very private drama of their own.

One of Miss O’s many, many notebooks.

All of this is just to say, dear friend, given all that you are going through in your personal life and against whatever landscape this letter finds you, I know that you may merely glance at or dip into this post, and I completely understand. Thanks for reading at all, and whatever you do, don’t strain yourself. Enjoy your Sunday. Let me hear from you when you get a chance.

It’s been a long three weeks. Encouragement!

I keep humming, all the time lately, “It’s You I Like.” Like a mantra.

Love,

Miss O’

P.S. A few weeks ago I published part of a play I’ve been working on, but I don’t know if WordPress is the best outlet for me. Thanks to all who read it, in any case!

Quick Take, for Whites during Black History Month

A Condensed History of Whiteness in America

Hi, kids. If you are a friend of mine, I am not telling you something that you don’t already know; and I’ve written about this before. But a few years ago, my late super, who was from Eastern Europe under communism and who had never learned American history—not unlike contemporary whites in red states today—asked me, “Lisa, can you tell me please what it is about the Blacks?” I didn’t follow. “Why all the whites hate them. What did they do?”

Do you hear his question? Here’s a man who at that point had lived two decades in the United States, himself an immigrant working around every conceivable type of immigrant, from tenants to other supers to management, in the most diverse area of the world, my borough of Queens in New York City. He heard and saw all the racism, surely from the white men (because I still hear it now through their support of Trump), but he really didn’t know where it was coming from. “I have these Jamaican guys who do the electrical work for the building, there, and they are great. They smoke the marijuana, the smell, my god, I hate it, but they are great.”

And so it was that Miss O’ did a brief history for him.

Black Africans were brought to the United States in chains beginning in 1619, if not earlier, men, women, and children captured by white European men or purchased as prisoners in their own land where there was no concept of enslavement for life let alone forever in perpetuity along with your families, which is what whites did in the United States. To justify this horrific practice, and to justify unlimited greed, whites started deciding that they were superior to all other colors of humans. They must be, because as the Puritan descendants of the Second Great Awakening said of being among the elect going to heaven (as explained to me by my 11th grade high school English teacher Chuck Edwards), “Surely, if you were not among the elect, surely God would not have blessed you with a Cadillac.” Or made you white.

The plantation system in the American South made each plantation owner a little king, a greedy little tyrant (just like the “farmer king,” King George III from whom we were emancipated, oh, irony), who kept all the money he made from his crops and made even more by working slave labor just about to death—no hope of leaving, no money, no say—morning, noon, and night, and forcing the strongest Black men to “breed” Black women as a bull would cows, when the tyrant wasn’t raping those same Black women for his pleasure and a stable of more (mulatto) slaves.

Meanwhile, the white people in the South who did not own land, and that was nearly all of them, had no work. They looked on, impoverished, as these Blacks were “given” houses and food in exchange for work, work which poor whites did not have, homes which poor white were not given (clearly not comprehending the horror). There was a growing (and understandable) resentment. To quell this, white tyrants told their legions of poor whites, “Always know that at least you are superior because you are not having to labor like these beasts.” To appease them, the tyrants dropped a nickel and handed a gun to any poor white man who was pissed off and said, “Guard my slaves.”

And so it was that for 400 years, poor, uneducated, angry whites came to believe that they themselves would have more if only those Blacks weren’t here, and that guns were identity. And they weren’t wrong, though their logic was. What these charming, charismatic white tyrants were able to convince these poor whites of was that he, the landowning rich tyrant, had no choice but to use “free labor” so that he could be rich and live like a king, that God had blessed him, and he had to fulfill this promise to God by being the richest one.

And despite a Civil War, despite education and marches and all of the hard work of generations of Blacks, Native Americans, and enlightened, moral whites (immigrants all), there are still vast swathes of white Americans who truly believe that IF ONLY there were no Blacks (and now browns, too), they themselves would have it so good.

The Donald Trumps of the world—the ones who deny wages, safe working conditions, clean air and water, and health care to anyone not them—have been such absolute geniuses at convincing poor white people to feel so sorry for them that these poor white people empty their pockets and do whatever it takes to prove their love to the rich white man God. And the poor white people still blame Blacks for their fate.

I learned about this book from the Toni Morrison documentary, The Pieces I Am. Recommended reading.

Following my quick take on the horrors of the Black experience and white supremacy, my building super from Eastern Europe was silent. He looked at me and said, “Why they don’t kill all of you?”

That’s the million-dollar question.

I’m about to make a couple of broad generalizations.

Black culture in America is a culture of love and faith. It’s a culture rooted in ebullience, joy, dance, music, energy, justice, hope, and deep, deep love despite deep trauma and great suffering. I have seen it and felt it all my life. Not that there aren’t assholes and tyrants; I’m talking about roots.

White culture in America, dating back to Puritans and colonizers, is a culture rooted in punishment, jealousy, cruelty, demands for some kind of Christian self-abnegation (that no one can achieve), faith in (one man’s) white superiority, and fear born of trauma, our original sins of Native genocide and Black enslavement. White is right. Spare the rod and spoil the child. “God’s will” is for me to lord it over you. I am God. Not that there aren’t lovely white people; I’m talking about roots.

See how white supremacy works? Image from the web.

And I am so fucking sick of white culture—the good things whites bring to the table are, perhaps, irony, Greek logic, and wryness (all of which are embodied by The Onion), and of course Mary Oliver and Shakespeare and bagpipes. Right now, for me, that’s about it. Even the best of our white politicians play by the white tyrant’s rules without even realizing it. We all do.

You can follow Digital Meddle Your Childhood Ruined on Instagram.

“Mediocre white boys,” to borrow from the brilliant and righteous Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), have taught all of us whites—ALL of us—to feel sorry for them. To pity them, poor helpless things. To give them money and power. To give them a pass. Meanwhile, all that the rest of us sentient whites do for our entire lives is play that same old song, “RESIST,” and I am so fucking sick of it. These white men rape, they steal, they stiff, they destroy, and then they smile, and we pity them all over again, don’t we? And carry our clever signs to the latest march.

This is changing. I do see hope. But we have to crack it all open and drain out the rest of the pus. White culture as a whole, ultimately, must change, or else we take the planet down with us. And this Black History Month, we have to see the joy of embracing all the greatness that Blacks bring to the world. Celebrate. Emulate.

Love from her core of rage,

Miss O’

Wise words from t

Miss O’ Booking It: On Groundhog Day in 2025, Reflections on Black History Month

Last night I looked around at my personal library, and I decided that for Black History Month, I will post pictures of the books I own, starting with children’s books I love.

I can’t explain how the story, the format, and the pictures accomplish their miracle, but I cannot read this book without laughing and ugly crying. It’s beautiful
Such a surprising and wonderful subject, beautifully told and rendered.
What we as humans should all share. Come on, now.

In pulling these wonderful books out to reread (and I’ve never understood why great books have to be categorized into “children’s books”) and suggest for you, I also happened on my 50th anniversary copy of Free to Be You and Me.

Back in 1972, Free to Be You and Me, both a record album and book, became national bestsellers. I know I’ve written about this before: the album, played in elementary and middle school classrooms all over, the book on library shelves, featured “Marlo Thomas and Friends,” and her friends included Mel Brooks, Alan Alda, Lucille Clifton, Judy Blume, Carl Reiner, Shel Silverstein, and many other wonderful talents. In 2002, however, about the 50th anniversary of this remarkable celebration of diversity in community, the publisher was silent. Why? Because the MAGA millions would have demanded the banning of the book, would have stormed the publisher’s offices, maybe, so ignorant, angry, and fanatical in their hatred of anyone not white and male, had this group become.

I don’t know about you, but today, February 2, 2025, I feel like I’m living through the classic American movie Groundhog Day. This lunatic country can’t seem to move the hell on, grow up, be joyful, and get a goddamned grip on itself. In 1972, coming out of the peace and love movements that emerged out of civil rights and voting rights struggles, antiwar protests, extreme violence by our police and military on peaceful American citizens, Free to Be You and Me was this joyful, light, funny, and also serious clarion call for all of us to see the wisdom, really, of children, of artists. Love people. Learn about them. Celebrate the good. Sing, read, play, dance it out. Do you work. Have fun doing it. Look at us now.

In my Creative Drama class in middle school, Miss Graves played this record over and over, using it to teach about the many ways to tell a story.

When Ronald Reagan was elected to the presidency in 1980 (ironically, his catch phrase was “There you go again”), all the promise of progress embodied by President Jimmy Carter not only came to a screeching halt, but we went back 80 years. Groundhog Day, all over again. The journey of Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is our American story.

When President Barack Obama was elected by a solid majority in 2008, and his inauguration was attended by the largest crowd ever seen, then and to this day, I ugly cried with relief. Finally, I hoped, we were moving on, like that time Bill Murray’s Phil finally has a great date with Andie MacDowell.

But it doesn’t take, that great date, and Phil just fucks it all up again, day after Groundhog Day, because he can’t seem to learn anything about how to be a better man.

We elected Trump. Twice. See what I mean?

All of President Joe Biden’s progress is being undone. Trump’s administration and all federal offices will no longer celebrate Black History Month or Juneteenth; the CDC has taken down all information about LGBTQ+ acceptance or health; these fuckers think they can simply erase all the progress, all the humanity, all the education of two generations.

Phil’s fucked up Groundhog Day yet again. “I got you, babe.”

But you know what? Remember in that movie how Phil has to go to rock bottom, to day after day after repeated day including numerous violent attempts at suicide, before it finally occurs to him that aside from feeling like a hopeless immortal god, he might, you know, use this gift of eternal life to learn piano, say, to save lives, to make friends, to bring his coworkers coffee, to invest in the community?

I think it’s vital to our survival to remember the message of that perfect movie, that for each of us, life is Groundhog Day. You wake up, you begin, and you can live it the same way you did yesterday and the day before that, or you can begin anew, grow, find joy, and have a good time in your personal hell. I’m not saying it’s easy.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., one of the finest writers and minds this country ever produced, lived through the horrors of WWII and produced Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death in 1969, five years after I was born and three years before Free to Be You and Me, for which he wrote the afterword:

Into the second day of this Black History Month, on this Groundhog Day, I hope we realize we don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it.

Sending love,

Miss O’

P.S. The Ed Sullivan Show, on the air from 1948 until 1971, when I was 7, was this marvelous compendium and showcase of all the wacky and beautiful and radiant stuff what was our common culture. For Black History Month, I’d like to close with “Pata Pata” by Miriam Makeba, should you need to celebrate living.

A Work in Progress, Part 1

To my three readers–Hi, Anna!–I’ve been working on a play for a couple of years that I think would actually make a good TV series in these seriously troubled times. The title is up for grabs. Here’s part of Act 1.

Love, Lisa

WAVY DAVY’S PERPETUAL SOUP HOUSE KITCHEN

A PLAY by Lisa O’Hara

ACT I, SCENE 1

[AT RISE: Marv is typing at a laptop in a coffee shop. PHIL is sitting at the table sipping coffee and reading a book. They are in their 60s.]

MARV: I want to tell this story with unflinching honesty.

PHIL: “Unflinching honesty.” So, what is “flinching honesty”?

MARV: [beat] Why do you do this, Phil?

PHIL: [beat] Because I care about meaning, Marv. What is “unflinching” honesty if there’s no opposite? If you are honest, you are honest. Why do you qualify it like a Book World critic? Are you worried what they will think? There’s no they, Marv. Only the truth.

MARV: There you go, Phil. [picking up an old argument, not necessarily his] We all know there’s a They and you know who they are, but you don’t really, do you, and that’s the maddening part. No, it’s not them [pointing] though that would be convenient for your politics, right? And how can They be playing you and playing them, those others on the opposite side as you…

PHIL: …the flinching ones…

MARV: …all the while taking all the fucking money? It’s like the aliens we all know exist, and so how is it no one has ever spilled that secret? So that’s how They operate, and it’s so fucking pissing fucked up. [MUSIC, good blues rock]

PHIL: Who are you right now? [MARV smiles. So does PHIL.]

SCENE 2

[Projected: 1988]

JUNIE: [outside the scene, stirring a big pot of soup, tasting, adding spices] Marv pulled up to the curb of the Leave It to Beaver street in Annandale, Virginia, in his used Ford Grenada, a color of brown no car should come in, and I remember he put it in park though he was always unsure about turning off the engine because of the other times it cut out, or just didn’t go, like when we were on Rt. 123 with our friends Gary and Phil, Marv flooring the gas for uphill acceleration and didn’t nothin’ happen, and he was screaming…

MARV: [looking up from laptop] Here’s some advice, kids. If you have to buy a car, don’t buy a used car, and if you have to buy a used car, don’t buy a Ford, and if you have to buy a Ford, don’t by a Grenada, and if you have to buy a Grenada, don’t buy a brown one!

JUNIE: But on this day, a humid but decent early summer day perfumed by freshly mown grass, Marv was not terrified we’d get rundown by a semi. He was beaming, glowing, about to show his bride, his love, me, their, our, new house. [MARV beams] Yes, on this July day in 1988, at the age of 38, he, Marvin Allen Frischberg, had done the thing he’d sworn on his bell-bottom jeans and tie-dye tee shirt at the 1968 Democratic National Convention he’d never do: use his earnings from a steady job in American government…

MARV: …all this, thanks to the fuckin’ man, of all things…

JUNIE: … to further suckle on the teat of American corporate capitalism by entering into a life phase of home ownership with a woman to whom he was wed. But there we were. And Marv was exhilarated.

[In shadow, a jubilant MAN gets out of a car; a WOMAN next to him stares out.]

JUNIE: Next to Marv in the used brown Ford Grenada was that very bride, aptly named June, Junie to everyone; together, what thirteen, fourteen years, married by our friend Kenny, dead of AIDS four years that August, who’d gotten a Universal Life certification out of the back of Rolling Stone to perform the ceremony, was it really nine years before, in the backyard of Gary’s “communal” house on Glebe Road…

MARV: [typing in cafe] …just a few miles outside the District. When Junie said, “Where are we?” I said, “Our house,” thinking total Graham Nash, and my Joni, my Junie, unclicked the barely operational seat belt, opened the passenger door, and…I shit you not, she began vomiting to the point of dry heaves…

JUNIE: And I was thinking, The Dry Heaves would be a great name for a band.

MARV: I was sure that Junie was really pregnant this time, and I was overcome with joy.

JUNIE: [lifting a ladle] Who wants soup?

SCENE 3

[Music. Projected:] 1973

[PHIL and MARV, aged 23 or so, are playing chess at the kitchen table in the Arlington, Virginia, kitchen on Glebe Road. It’s the first Watergate Summer. PHIL has just check-mated MARV again. GARY, also 23, who owns the house with his mother, enters from the kitchen with a bowl of soup and a stack of saltines.]

GARY: [setting down his bowl and crackers on a TV tray] You know who they are? I am they. I run the fucking world. I’ll prove it. [GARY uses the remote to turn off the Watergate hearings on television; he turns to flip on PHIL’s remote control stereo invention to turn on the radio, then flips it off. He then flips on another remote control to pull down the shade on the west-setting sun.]

PHIL: My inventions are useful.

GARY: I read all about this stuff! [GARY points to his stacks of Popular Mechanics magazines, his copies of National Review, his stack of articles from the Washington Star; possibly these are projected.] You think none of this matters, and that these bogus Senate hearings matter, okay, you’re wrong, but okay. You know what really runs all this? [gestures to room, to the world] Computers! Have you seen Phil’s computer room? Everything in the world will be run from those computers if we aren’t careful.

MARV: [lifting a pawn to move into position, first using it as a microphone] But who’s the man behind the computer? Who are you, Phil? What is your agenda?

PHIL: [into the “microphone” before Marv places it in position on the board; speaking now into his knight before positioning it] I’m nobody, frankly. I have no agenda. Just chaos for its own sake. That’s your they, Gary. And you can’t stop me, I mean them, I mean us. I’m two moves away from “check” for those playing at home. And so are the Watergate prosecutors. [Slams the knight onto the board. Marv quickly moves to capture the knight.]

GARY: Fuck you. [He turns on a tall, loud metal standing fan, directs it toward his chair, sits and eats.]

PHIL: [moving his queen] Language. Check.

[The phone rings, a ring in the living room and another ring from the kitchen, behind them. Note: All telephones of this period are black, heavy, rotary, and land lines. The kitchen phone is a wall unit.]

JUNIE: [from the kitchen; remains offstage until entrance] Hello?

[Beat, as Phil, listening, turns off the loud fan with another remote, Marv studies the board, and Gary stuffs crackers and soup.]

JUNIE: [gently, really asking] Davy, sweetie, are you high?

[PHIL laughs so hard he tips the whole board over. Marv moves to clean it up.]

CAROL ONE: [entering from hall wearing a mini dress and block heels and carrying a pocketbook, calls] Gary! Gary, I had to walk from the bus stop. Walk, Gary, again. God it’s hot. [Kicks off her shoes, throwing one at Gary; sees game.] Gee, I wonder who’s winning, Phil? Marv, why do you even try? Seriously, Gary, this is bullshit. Are you enjoying your late lunch?

GARY: [eats, hasn’t looked up] You. Said. Five. It’s three.

CAROL ONE: The firm closed early today, the bosses are taking a long weekend on the Eastern Shore.

GARY: And I would divine this how exactly? Why didn’t you call?

CAROL ONE: The line was busy all day. And I told you yesterday. Twice.

GARY: That motherfucking party line. I’m so sick of it.

JUNIE: Okay. Just a second. [calling out from kitchen] Can anyone drive me to the restaurant?

PHIL: I would but I won’t have time, sorry.

MARV: I would but no car. [ALL look at GARY, who doesn’t look up.]

JUNIE: Davy, no one is going to drive into the District now. I can try a bus. [beat] Okay, I’ll be ready.

[JUNIE enters. She is a Breck girl, an earth mother, Joni, and Janis, and Georgia O’Keeffe, depending on the lighting of the moment and who is looking.]

JUNIE: [going to the basement door] Darnell’s coming to get me in Davy’s car. Can someone get me later?

MARV: [gets up after placing chess pieces in a box, goes to Junie, presses into her and kisses her neck; she yields instantly] Come here for a minute. [They disappear into the basement, shutting the door.]

CAROL ONE: Give you any ideas, lover? [CAROL unbuttons her dress, straddles Gary in his chair. PHIL takes no notice as he checks his watch, finds his keys.]

GARY: Come off it, Carol! My mother will be home any minute.

PHIL: Okay, kids, time for my shift. Enjoy your Friday evening not having to write tomorrow’s top headlines.

GARY: For that rag that has it out for Nixon. What other lies are you going to print about him tonight?

PHIL: Gary, until you can admit you are bent, you will always be an angry little fascist.

GARY: Take it back.

PHIL: Which part?

GARY: Fuck you. Carol, let’s go. [Grabs her hand, heads upstairs. Carol squeals.]

[Screen door slamming is heard. GLADYS, a woman in her 50s, but with a full embrace of polyester, enters, carrying groceries, goes into the kitchen.]

GLADYS: Hi, Phil. Heading off? [PHIL kisses her cheek, jangles keys, and exits; GLADYS from kitchen.] What’s all this soup? It’s maybe a hundred degrees out there. Who’s watching the stove? Where is everyone? [Vague sounds of pounding, mattress springs, faint moans emerge from upstairs and basement; GLADYS, appearing oblivious, goes to living room and uses the remote to turn on radio full blast, and scene. The song is, perhaps, Charlie Rich “Behind Closed Doors” or Marvin Gaye “Let’s Get It On” or David Bowie “Space Oddity” or Barry White “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More, Baby” or another hit of the summer that you think fits the mood.]

SCENE 4

[The bustling kitchen of a restaurant, same late afternoon of 1973, a small black and white TV set with antennae shows Watergate hearings, end of day reportage, muffled sound. Two assistants, MARTIN and FRANKIE, watch as they chop vegetables, etc., and DAVY prepares to show JUNIE how to pull pin bones from fish. DAVY is a white man of 24 or so, in chef attire, a shorter Rock Hudson-meets-rock star whom his friends call “artistic.” DARNELL, a sweet, observant Black man, about 19, comes from the back carrying a white coat or apron, which he puts on.]

JUNIE: [standing amidst the chaos] Why am I here, sweetie? I don’t understand fine dining.

DAVY: [handing Junie an apron and guiding her to the sink] You are tonight’s pin bone wizard. Wash your hands. Mike’s out sick, and of all nights it’s a fish Friday, but here we are, and you are an artist, an angel with a needle, I need an artist. There are your tweezers, down there is the prepared fish—all you do is pull out the bones.

JUNIE: [putting on apron, walking over from the sink with dish cloth] Davy, sweetie, you do know that I push a needle in…

DAVY: [takes dish cloth from her] But you also take the pins out, and hurry, dear one, hurry, dinner starts at 6 PM. Chop, chop. [Turns off television set, demands] Martin! Frankie! Those Jell-O salads won’t unmold themselves! [They follow Davy into the next room.]

JUNIE: [opens the cooler and screams] Holy mother of pearl, my poor fingers…

DARNELL: I can help you. [They begin removing bones.] Each filet has about ten. Or twenty. [DARNELL smiles. JUNIE is meticulous, like an artist, as DARNELL points, supervises. Beat. Beat.]

DAVY: [offstage] Faster, faster, faster!

[JUNIE pulls a final bone as DARNELL transfers that fish to a waiting cooler and then lifts a new fish onto the board for JUNIE to attack. DAVY enters. He looks around, and plants a kiss on DARNELL’s neck as DARNELL turns and gives DAVY his lips. JUNIE, laser focused and very quick now, doesn’t notice. They separate as MARTIN and FRANKIE push backwards through the swinging doors bearing trays of perfectly molded green Jell-O with cabbage and carrots. Scene.]

SCENE 5

Davy’s Soup Rules [Projected, with music, and VO possibly.]

  1. READ THE RULES BEFORE YOU FUCKING TOUCH THIS POT.
  2. I AM NOT FUCKING KIDDING.
  3. Keep stove burner on LOW!
  4. Use the stainless steel pot only!
  5. Water only!
  6. Fresh vegetables only!
  7. NO MEAT! NO FISH! NO POULTRY! NO!
  8. NO STARCH! That includes NO POTATOES, NO PEAS, NO BEANS. NO!
  9. Herbs and salt OK.
  10. Stir occasionally.
  11. Keep lid on when not stirring or serving.
  12. Serve soup atop whatever starch or fish or meat makes you horny for life.

Act I, Scene 6

[SCENE: Kitchen table on Glebe, 1974; linoleum and chrome and four matching chairs and three mismated ones. MARV, PHIL, GARY, and DAVY sit with various mugs and Tupperware glasses. PHIL with a national paper, reading, begins to snort out a chuckle.]

PHIL: [reading] “Spiro Agnew disbarred.”

DAVY: Was he now.

GARY: I think Agnew got a rotten deal.

PHIL: The Maryland appeals court called him, “morally obtuse.”

MARV: [a mock scolding] Language, Phil!

DAVY: But can a sitting elected official really be the subject of an indictment? Isn’t a president, or a vice president, the moral equivalent of a king?

MARV: The morally obtuse equivalent. Yes. [DAVY and PHIL chuckle.]

GARY: This nonsense is spiraling out of control. If they can come after Nixon, and Agnew, they can come after anyone…

PHIL: Maybe. If I made enough money to pay taxes, I’d pay them.

MARV: Except for the war taxes.

DAVY: Fuck the war taxes.

PHIL: Do you, Gary?

GARY: Do I what? [beat as others look at him] Any money I make is money I earn.

MARV: In cash, who’s to know?

[Junie interrupts waving an envelope.]

JUNIE: Hey, Gary.

GARY: Is that the rent?

PHIL: Your tax-free rent, oh Landlord.

DAVY: Do we Deep Throat him?

GARY: That’s your department.

DAVY: I’m here, I’m queer, but at least I pay my taxes. Mostly.

JUNIE: [observing; giggles] I… [stops her thought] … who wants soup?

DAVY: You what? You what? I saw that giggly gleam in your eye. You have the best face when you get an idea.

MARV: I feel art coming.

PHIL: [reaches to press MARV toward table, looks behind him] Art? Art who?

[Lights change, special light on JUNIE. VOICES fade out as music rises, e.g., “Eve of Destruction.” Collage art with painted photo or painting of the four friends around the kitchen table; gradually superimposed on each face are high school photos, ca. 1965. MARV, PHIL, GARY, and DAVY are fifteen years old.]

PHIL: [reading] The British Invasion is upon us.

DAVY: To say nothing of the Russians and the North Vietnamese.

GARY: You’re saying we shouldn’t fight the commies? The commies can go to hell.

MARV: [imitating GLADYS] Language!

PHIL: Now, boys, no politics at the table. [He gives a sieg heil, glances toward GARY while looking at MARV; locates a deck of cards.]

GARY: [looks under table] Mom?

DAVY: Beatles or Stones?

ALL: Beatles.

MARV: Acoustic Dylan or electric Dylan?

ALL: All the Dylans!

 [PHIL deals cards; Davy takes out a baggy of weed as Gary finds rolling papers, if possible, Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” comes up, possibly a record put on by one of them.]

ALL: [singing as they pass a joint, play poker] “Look out kid
It’s somethin’ you did
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again
You better duck down the alley way
Lookin’ for a new friend
The man in the coon-skin cap
By the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills
You only got ten”

[Light shifts to JUNIE. VOICES fade out as music rises, Chubby Checker “The Twist,” lights change. Art montage superimposes school photos, ca. 1960. MARV, PHIL, GARY, and DAVY are ten years old.]

PHIL: [reading, carefully] “Richard Leaky…”

MARV: “Leaking?”

PHIL: [giggles, repeats] “Leaky… discovers our human ancestors in Africa.”

DAVY: [drawing his idea of one] And they are really, really old. [Shows picture to PHIL]

MARV: Not as old as dinosaurs. [Looks at Davy’s drawing.]

GARY: My dad says I am not a Negro.

MARV: What does that mean?

GARY: [shrugs] Dad says we are Americans and not Negroes from Africa.

PHIL: They don’t want you anyway, Gary. You can’t even twist. [twists]

MARV: [imitating his mother] Now, boys! That dance is immoral!

DAVY: How can anyone know where humans came from?

GARY: My dad says it’s aliens.

PHIL: So are we Americans or aliens?

DAVY: I think it could be aliens. I must be an alien. I just know it.

MARV: Where did the aliens come from?

[Light on JUNIE. Music changes. Tennessee Ernie Ford, “Ballad of Davy Crockett.” Montage: Collage art with photo or painting of the four friends around the kitchen table; gradually superimposed on each face is a first grade black and white photo ca. 1955. Lights change. MARV, PHIL, GARY, and DAVY are now six years old.]

PHIL: [looking at a comic book] My dad says they are cancelling Red Ryder.

DAVY: They are? How come?

GARY: My dad says Red Ryder got a rotten deal.

PHIL: My dad said Red got “damn boring.”

MARV: [imitating his mother] Language! [The boys giggle.]

GARY: This comic cancelling stuff is crazy! It’s not fair. It’s all gonna be like Batman, and I can’t stand Batman. Stupid capes!

DAVY: I only like comics where the men wear capes.

PHIL: You like the capes!

MARV: I think a man in a mask and a cape fighting crime is neato.

GARY: Matt Dillon wears a mask, but he doesn’t wear a cape, and Gunsmoke is still neat.

DAVY: You mean the Long [sic] Ranger wears a mask.

[Lights out on BOYS and up on table in 1974, the MEN playing cards, smoking, changing the lyrics to songs, perhaps. Lights separately on JUNIE gazing on finished work of a large, full collage of the eras of friendship. Song collage, closing perhaps with Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game”: “And the seasons they go round and round/ And the painted ponies go up and down/ We’re captive on a carousel of time…”]

DAVY: [entering with a bowl of munchies; to “My Boyfriend’s Back”] “My boyfriend’s black and there’s gonna be trouble, hey ma, hey ma, my boyfriend’s black…”

[CAROL ONE, enters with Lysol.]

CAROL ONE: You are terrible.

PHIL: [entering with a bong; to “Hey, Jude”] “Hey, doob, I want you bad,/ take my dad’s bong, and make it better…”

CAROL ONE: You think you are so cute.

GARY: [sees clock; grabbing bong and waving away smoke, takes Lysol from CAROL ONE.] My mom’s gonna be home soon, you guys.

MARV: [Three Dog Night’s “Mama Told Me Not to Come,” to GARY] “Mama told me not to come…” [MARV, PHIL, and DAVY join in, dancing, as music gains in volume.]

[JUNIE, smiling, holds her gaze on this scene as BLACKOUT.]

Act I, Scene 7

[Kitchen at Glebe Road, 1977. At table are two Vietnam vets, ROGER and MARK, both white men around age 30, in motorcycle gear. JUNIE ladles out soup into mismated mugs and brings them to the table where spoons and napkins are placed. GLADYS enters, smoking a cigarette, coughing, greeting the men.]

GLADYS: So how does Junie know you?

ROGER: Well, she was at one of our gatherings, to help veterans. Junie offered to do a poster for our meetings. And then we saw her at Safeway that time. Started talking.

GLADYS: You both live in Arlington?

MARK: Yes, ma’am. Appreciate the soup.

ROGER: Well, Mark’s closer to D.C. than I am. You know, a lot of people spit on the veterans.

GLADYS: Well, not Junie, she lost a brother, you know.

MARK: That’s what we hear.

GLADYS: That was 1966, ’67, wasn’t it? I mean, no sooner shipped over, wasn’t it?

[Lights up on area, living room, somewhere in Arlington, Virginia, ca. 1965, TIM MACNEIL in uniform, his father COL. DONALD MACNEIL in khakis, and his mother VIVIAN MACNEIL pose for a photograph. His sister JUNE, aged 17, takes the photo. After the flash goes off, VIVIAN begins weeping; TIM comforts her. COL. MACNEIL pats his son’s shoulder, picks up his kit; TIM hugs JUNE, goes with his father. VIVIAN pours a drink.]

MARK: So during Rolling Thunder, huh.

JUNIE: 1967. Yeah. [She pauses, only continues as others look to her for more information.] Tim enlisted as soon as war was declared. [Adding, unusually] Our dad was career Army.

ROGER: How old?

JUNIE: Eighteen, almost nineteen.

MARK: How old were you?

JUNIE: Seventeen.

GLADYS: Irish twins.

JUNIE: [picking up a loaf] Bread?

[MARV enters with satchel.]

MARV: Hello.

GLADYS: We have company. Marvin, meet Roger and Mark.

JUNIE: Soup?

MARV: Oh, right, the guys from the meeting. How ya doin’?

GLADYS: [to MARV] You know, it’s odd, isn’t it, that none of you boys served. [To MARK and ROGER, who pause in their eating.]

MARV: We didn’t. [Taking soup from JUNIE, to MARK and ROGER] I know I said this the other week, but I protested against the war. Our friend Phil was 4F for his flat feet. Davy was queer, but they wouldn’t believe him, so he went to school and was an art teacher for a while. I went to college and taught math—my parents came over during the Holocaust, and my mom would’ve gone nuts if I’d gone off to fight, but even still….

ROGER: What’s the Holocaust?

MARV: [patiently, instructively] Hitler’s genocide of Jews. Mostly Jews, but also homosexuals, resistance fighters…obviously not as known as it should be. Something like six million Jews were killed.

MARK: So you’re a Jew? [MARV looks up.] It’s cool. I don’t think I’ve, you know, ever talked to one before. That I knew of.

[PHIL enters, followed by GARY, in mid-discussion.]

GARY: So you’re saying that you actually think Carter has any fucking shot at all of getting peace in the…

PHIL: Oh, hello.

GLADYS: Gary, language, not in front of company. [PHIL and MARV grin without looking at each other.]

Copyright Lisa L. O’Hara 2023-2025. All rights reserved.

On the Decision to Leave Facebook

Searching for My Sanity

I’m sitting in my kitchen this Sunday, January 12, 2025, a week before the inauguration of the End of Times, feeling lucky and grateful to have a kitchen, and a rocker, and coffee, and art supplies; and despite some aches and pains (and as far as I know), my health. I was able to take a warm shower last night, and sleep in a warm bed covered in Irish knitted blankets and clean sheets. I awoke a little late this weekend morning because I could. The day is a cold, crisp, blue sky winter day in New York City, and by the grace of a good job (still in education after 37 years) and having bought my apartment 20 years ago instead of, say, last week, I get to live here, and affordably. Knock wood.

What I’m wondering about today, all these blessings notwithstanding given the wretched suffering of humans and the planet’s ecosystems as a result of sociopathic, capitalist policies and general stupidity, is whether or not I should continue using social media to communicate. (How privileged am I?) But really what I’m wondering is to do with the point of this whole tower of Babel, all of us voicing our views all the time via TikTok, Facebook, Twitter (X), Instagram, BlueSky, Substack, Medium, Blogger, WordPress, pick a platform. We can write, text, photograph, video, podcast, share it out en masse. So many of us with so much to say. Who is the audience? And to what end? I’m probably overthinking this.

I know from “stats,” for example, that after roughly 24 people “open” this post, approximately two people will read past the first two paragraphs. Possibly one person will finish the whole post. I suspect that person is almost always the same person, occasionally joined by one or two others. One occasional reader will “like” this post on Facebook without having read it (I know because the “like” comes within seconds of posting it) so as to be encouraging. One person may “like” the post at the source, such as on Substack or WordPress. I have “followers” on these sites, and “likes” are swell, but I have to say that none of this is what I’m after when I publish a piece.

Love Letters

As I’ve written before in many blog posts few have read, I write blogs because I miss writing longform letters. Whenever I was feeling really lost and out of sorts back in my youthful teaching days, for example, I would reflect on how many letters I’d sent and received in recent weeks. This would lead to me sitting down to type letters on my Smith-Corona (no carbons, so none of my long letters survive, I suspect), one to four pages, maybe six, single-spaced, on colorful letter paper, to five or six recipients at a go. Every letter had a different voice, subject, and slant, given the audience. Sometimes I included a folded article from The New Yorker or the Washington Post. By Sunday evening, after writing letters between grading stacks of papers—those letters addressed, stamped, and stickered with a return address and something pretty—I was a new girl. Monday morning I’d mail the letters from the school office where I taught, and I could feel breath return to my body. Letters meant connection to the wider world, to the hearts of my friends. I gave them pieces of my heart, and when I posted, I felt that my heart regenerated, times two.

The coming weeks ensured a return post from nearly all the recipients, from, say, my one living grandmother in Council Bluffs, Iowa; my former landlady and other friends in Central Virginia; my former costume design professor at Virginia Tech; my Bread Loaf friends in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, Tennessee, and Kuwait (or wherever she was teaching internationally that year). I no longer recall what I wrote in those letters, but I still have all the letters I received back. They fill half a closet, shoe boxes within boxes, and I treasure them as one would rare artifacts. I suspect that my trove may well be the last of the letters that humans will ever see, certainly over 60 years in America in the late 20th to 21st centuries. But that isn’t why I keep them. They are reminders of the ways we filled one another’s hearts, and deeply, once. To me every letter is a love letter.

The Social Network

One thing I’ve become sad about in the past decade is how social media, including texting, has been used as a replacement for letters and personal conversations. I no longer get that Pavlov’s dogs “warm feeling” when I hear the arrival of mail dropping through the slot. Junk in the form of requests from charities, a catalog, a flyer from a theater, a medical bill—these are all I can expect. When I do get personal mail—as small package, a postcard, or a card for an occasion—I do relish the note, usually very short, and mostly respond in kind. And I do love my sibling text threads; and some texting is an important way of writing brief letters with some old friends, so there is that.

We all have shorter attention spans, of course, technological “advances” being what they are, causing our brains to have been rewired to be more in line with ADHD tech developers (my personal theory) and less so with the slower and more deeply thinking (though not necessarily genius-level) people like me. Still, I think there is something to be said for being able to be quiet, and deep, and I miss it.

But what I am missing, more specifically, is the forging and maintaining of intimacy.

Instead of enjoying deep communion with friends, I, more often than not, provide and receive sound bites and sermons and memes. It’s all fun and games, however deeply felt our stories and rants, however witty or sweet or artful the picture posts. Less and less, I’m feeling that my life can be “both/and” when it comes to deep connection and social media on a platform. My brain and my heart feel frayed, like an old quilt, maybe, that I stopped really valuing and only look at out of habit.

Time Travels

I look at how the letters my parents received dwindled once they reached their 40s, when they and all their friends “back home” became busy with lots of children, school programs, second jobs; when aunts and uncles began dying. Distance and lack of time prevent us from keeping up with everyone; it’s life, and “everyone” is too many. It’s why we have reunions every decade or make special trips once or twice in our lives, or every Christmas, to reconnect with old friends. We also used to call people on the phone for a daily chat, or to faraway relatives on special occasions, but those calls were rare. I think my dad only called his mother two or three times a year, families then still mindful of the Depression and the charges for long distance. By contrast, when I was a teenager, I could stay on the phone for hours with a friend I’d seen all day at school. You remember.

While the invention of social media has afforded us a chance to quickly and easily locate, “friend,” and play voyeur into the lives of dozens, hundreds, thousands of long-lost chums and recent acquaintances, and to share our own photos and points of view, I’m wondering if it has been worth sacrificing depth for breadth, or when it started to feel like a sacrifice. I ask because I have never been lonelier in my life.

Possibly this is because I am sixty, and live alone (I am self-aware enough to realize I’m too odd to live any other way), and even if I weren’t single, I would be right back where my parents were, never hearing from anyone either, even if this isn’t 1973. I don’t want to devolve into nostalgia.

But what has happened in the past decade is that too many formerly intimate friends have relied on their social media posts—posts sent out to dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of friends or followers—as their sole means of communication with me, Miss O’ lumped among the throng. I stopped even texting some friends when the reply became, “Don’t you read by Facebook?” or took the form of an emoji, a heart or a unicorn, say, as if to express, “What makes you think you are so special that I would take time out of my active life to respond only to you personally?”

I had become a unicorn, but not special in the way of that creature so that anyone would want to seek me out. Have I done this to other friends? (Was it something I said?) A few years ago, I withdrew myself from a group text thread of friends when I realized that no one responded to anything I wrote. One friend said later, “I’m sorry that’s your perception.” No, that was the reality, as I saw the receipts. The good thing that came out of it was a restored one-on-one friendship with two of those people, much more personal and real, if you know what I mean. And more me, more fulfilling.

I will say, as far as media goes, the technology that is Zoom has been a godsend, and was especially so during Covid. Two couples, Anna and Michael in California and Frances and Jim in New Jersey, joined me for long, long conversations every few weeks during all those unlimited-use months during 2020-2021. We talked, read excerpts of books aloud, moved our computers to the kitchen to fix dinner or experiment with new cocktails, gave each other tours of our homes. In a culture that really isn’t into letter writing that much, now me included, Zoom became our way of sharing and connecting when there was no other way to get together.

So My Friend Susan Announced She’s Leaving Facebook

This was the spark of today’s blog. Susan is the kind of person who uses social media in the best way. She shares her family stories and adventures with the perfect amount of wit and detail that it’s like you are sitting at the kitchen table with her. She makes 2,000 people at a time feel that way, and it’s a real gift. I used to share fun little moments in New York City, and even self-published a little eBook to compile them (at the request of my friend Becca), but more and more my own use of the platform has turned into political screeds against stupidity. To the two-dozen sweet people who regularly nod in agreement with one or more of those posts, I am glad we can commiserate.

Because of the current state of society and disappearance of anything resembling an objective corporate press, we currently have political reasons for questioning the use of social media. “Meta,” for example, has announced this new “anti-censorship” policy, as “X” has done, which really boils down to “Feel free to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” (which I learned as a student in Mr. Hart’s fifth grade class is illegal as well as immoral). This is why Susan is leaving. I asked, “Have you considered writing a blog?”

The Open Blog Culture

Blog culture can be so much pissing in the wind, I guess, but there’s something rather dear about it, I think. Those of us so inclined can pour out our hearts in longform letters without postage. (Note: several of my artistic writer friends find my blogs unreadable or disappointingly un-writerly, etc., and my view is that they wouldn’t send back a critique of a letter, now, would they? So. Maybe sit on that and spin. I say that with love.) And while I still make personal cards with collages and quotations, and send short notes periodically, I will say writing a blog post fills the need I feel (mostly, though I feel it less and less, finding I have less and less to say, or at any rate to say to you, my friend(s)) to write a complete idea, or to explore an idea as completely as I have the mind to in the moment. However, while this act sorts my brain, my heart does not regenerate, not exactly. I do miss that.

Let me hear from you, should you feel that, too, but not on Facebook. I think that one will have to go. I will do a gradual release, though; it’s the only way I hear about deaths, for example, or childhood friends and former students in success or distress. I like Instagram, but the only posts I see in my feed—all my own doing because I “followed” them—include political news about He That Shall Not Be Named, and only one or two sweet photos from actual dear friends. I tried BlueSky, but it’s become all-HTSNBN-all-the-time, too. No one, it seems, knows how to get off that ride, and no amount of posting my distress about that is going to change anything. I feel my brain atrophying just thinking about it.

All that time I spend worrying on social media—what else might I be doing instead?

Now it’s noon, and I need to go for a long walk and see what’s doing in the neighborhood. Maybe I’ll call somebody later, who knows. What about you?

Sending love,

Miss O’

P.S. I have another blog on Substack, and have duplicated the posts. However, I think I will use this space to do more creative work. Will see what happens–and thanks for reading, in any case.

Don’t Let It Be the Last Dance

Reflections on democratic voting in a time of rising fascism

I Sit in My Kitchen Rocker Waiting…

As I Lay Dying, “I Stand Here Ironing”…I keep thinking of titles around the anxiety of working out our lives, and deaths, so much of which is out of our control. We have to, more often than not, depend on others, on the actions and emotions and convictions of others, to make our own lives bearable. And today I’m feeling how terrible that can be, and also how reassuring.

Today I “early voted” here in Queens, surprised by the lack of turnout, in some ways, but this being New York, local Democrats don’t have a lot of competition. (Still, I live in an area full of Trump voters, particularly Hispanics, too many of whom more or less worship the man (if tee shirts are evidence) who plans to deport them within days of returning to office, citizens or not, it won’t matter.) The poll workers gave me such heart, though, just to see them there, all caring so much about democracy.

Scenes from a day of early voting, Queens, NY

I’ve been imagining during my sleepless nights the consequences of a second Trump presidency—I cannot see how we are really here, but then no one imagined a Trump to begin with, so showered with love and celebrity coverage by a besotted press. Last night I went to see a play at 59E59 Theater here in New York called Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library by Jenny Lyn Bader. The subject of the play is the period of days a young Hannah Arendt was imprisoned and interrogated by a Nazi officer (whom she ultimately convinces to help her) in Germany in 1933. The investigating Nazi officer in the early days of Hitler’s Chancellorship and martial law is convinced that Mrs. Stern, rather than working on her dissertation, is mimeographing and distributing overseas the antisemitic writings and cartoons in the German papers. Because of who she is, we know that Arendt gets out, since she will famously go on to cover the Nuremberg Trials, there to develop a philosophy around the nature of evil and the ordinary people who become complicit.

I became increasingly, deeply horrified watching this play as I realized that this is America’s future, quite literally, with camps and the rest of it, unless Harris is elected. And this time, no hyperbole.

The treacherous New York Times gets scared straight.

The consequences of this election will affect every citizen who is not rich and sociopathic in horrifying ways. Anyone who says we aren’t all in this together is a dope. Years ago (I probably told you this story), I was at a favorite bar in Midtown Manhattan, a great after work sort of bar, and there was a commuter from New Jersey there sometimes, if he had just missed a train. We would chat. When Obama was running for president, I said, “We are all in this together,” and the guy (white, 30s, business type), looked up from his scotch and smirked, “I’m not.” And I said, “Where do you think you got that drink? How do you think it showed up on that bar?” and he said, “I don’t give a shit.” And I got up and said, “You are despicable. I believe I’ll have my drink down here.” And he looked at me, stunned, as I moved. A few days later, he was at the bar again, and he tried to catch my eye. I cut him dead and walked on to the end of the bar for a seat. Returning from the restroom later, he paused and said, “Can a despicable person buy you a drink,” and I said, cold and hard, “No thanks.” Cheers.

Bars are equal opportunity institutions in society, as are commuter trains, and they don’t generally fail us. Two institutions that have failed the United States, however, and most decidedly in the past four decades are 1) the free press; and 2) the Christian Church. Both used to have one thing in common, in that (at their best) in their respective ways, through investigation and preaching, they existed to bring to the People the truth, the way, and the light. Today, both, at their worst, have one thing in common yet again: the love of money.

The love of money is the root of all evil, and if I hear one more ill-informed person of “faith” say even one more time, “I think Trump is better for the economy,” I may run naked and screaming into traffic on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (the “economy” under Trump was Obama’s until Trump wrecked it). Today’s Evangelical Christian churches, since the televangelism on TV in the 1980s to today, preach “send me, your pastor, a lot of cash, even if it means emptying your savings accounts.” The newspapers, bought out by billionaires with egos the size of Arnold Palmer’s junk (keeping it classy, Trump), want to curry favor for and provide support to other billionaires. The information printed in today’s newspapers is accidental and incidental to their owners’ true purpose. And yet journalists, as do some Christian pastors, try.

Sister Lisa and Brother Mike in conversation

Despite the quotation marks I use now—”free” press and “Christian” church—I try to remember that there are, really, so many good people. We cannot give up. Please vote. Encourage others to vote. As I walked home from my polling site this morning, a woman accompanying her (I think) elderly mother on a walker stopped me, pointed to my sticker, and asked where the polling site was. I told her, and she looked disappointed—it’s a bit of a walk—but she thanked me and turned to explain to her mother in their language. Because there really is plenty of room for all of us.

With freedom and justice for all, dammit.

Love,

Miss O’

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Morning Glory, Message from a Friend in America

Yesterday walking from the farmer’s market
My friend
Who is
Never wrong
Unfortunately
Asks me about the trip
I’m taking home
South
To see
A gang of friends
All of us this year 60
My friend says “You need to be prepared
For their health.” She says
“Do you know about their health?”
What the hell kind of thing is that to ask
I become wobbly
And I realize
We are dying
My friend who is never wrong
Unfortunately needs me to face
The inevitable
Age and death
Of friends, of myself, of all this.

Yesterday my friend who is
Never wrong
Unfortunately
Tells me as we walk
In her way
That she has accepted
Defeat and the end of the republic
Tells me to be careful what I say
In the South
So I don’t get in trouble
And I say
fuck fear
So loud
That Appalachia can hear me
Her lips purse,”Mmmm.”

At the kitchen table with her husband
My friend who is never wrong
Unfortunately says
“I have sad news. All the morning
Glories are gone. All of them are dead now.”
And I know I saw some on my walk the other day
Bursting in purple glory bloom still
But I guess it’s today they stopped blooming
And I missed it. I say nothing.
“All of them are gone. Sad.”
And I sit with my tea and my scone at
My friend’s
Formica table knowing I am wrong about
Everything
I guess
And don’t know how to be
With all this, all this death, all this unstoppable
Ending
“Sad.”
Mmmm.

On my way hope
I mean home
I buy a bottle of good red wine
“Hello, Sunshine,” says the employee
Who says I bring the light
Even as I wander out
Wonder how I will live
In red sips
Of this dark world.

Today
This new morning,
blue sky and sun,
I have a text from my friend
Who is never wrong,
“So I was wrong about one thing:
I still saw some morning glories this morning—
they’re there if they are facing East.
The ones facing South were gone though—
as they were gone yesterday.”

She was wrong about one thing.
And if she was wrong about that
One thing
She could be wrong about
(Fortunately)
Almost everything
And to everyone in America I say
Like the faithful who practice
In every faith
Face East, not South
And we, too, will not be gone.

Morning glories of Queens, facing east. Photo by Miss O’, fall, 2024

Last-Minute Saves: Completing the Assignment

On Friday at work, on a Zoom call with the “team” and managers and the director of the division and a program “author” who is guiding our work, there was a pause after 40 minutes of presentation and feedback from the author to ask questions. I asked a good question, one I really wanted the answer to. The author relished answering it. I asked clarifying questions, and he answered those. It was hard to read my director’s face, but I know the team was glad of the questions, given the “Directly to you” notes on the Chat feature of Zoom, “Great question,” “I’m so glad you asked that,” etc.

When I left the meeting, I said to myself, “Well, Lisa, once again you may have saved your job.” What I asked—after months of keeping my head down and being quiet as we embarked on this new project—and how the author answered, may well indeed have provided a breakthrough for what will make the next version of the product really special and useful for teachers and students.

My whole life, I reflected this afternoon, has been a series of last-minute saves.

When I was a Christmas tree shearer one summer in the Blue Ridge Mountains, for example, I was having a hard time keeping up, and my rows, though sheared well enough, took me twice as long as others on the crew to complete. After several days of this that first week, I determined to keep pace with a woman next to me, because she was a good shearer and very fast. And keep pace I did. I learned the next day that one of our other crew members had been fired for slow work and because “his trees weren’t good enough.” The crew chief, Sharon, I’m sure would have fired me too, and it would have killed my spirit. Something inside me saved me from this fate.

In a writing workshop in my senior summer of graduate school, after a mediocre first attempt at a short story, and a second attempt that my professor felt was as good as it would get and not in need of a workshop, I wondered if I’d ever write a third and final piece worthy of the work everyone else was doing. I was certainly vocal—participating, challenging, encouraging—and if I’m going to talk that much about how I receive writing, surely I should write something worth reading. And one evening in my dorm room overlooking the lawns at sunset just after supper, I found myself writing in a blaze, a fictional account of my great grandmother’s life in Iowa. It all came in one night, with a crucial misspelling my professor mentioned in the dining hall at breakfast after he’d read the story prior to the day’s workshop. I raced to the computer lab and did the ol’ Control/Find, and I could tell he was pleased by my passion. A student in the workshop gave me a bottle of wine before class, “For the best story of the summer.” How did this happen?

I had a similar save in my second summer of graduate school at the Oxford campus. I was studying Virginia Woolf with an eminent Exeter College scholar who also taught James Joyce. After reading a collection of short fiction, Jacob’s Room, and Mrs. Dalloway, I had to produce my first paper. What would I write about? I decided it had to be Mrs. Dalloway, but what about it? I had no idea. I just couldn’t think. That evening, my friend Anna, who was taking a different course focus that summer, came by my room to see if I still wanted to go to the cinemas and see Howards End, just released, starring Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, and Helena Bonham Carter. I told her my dilemma. “When is it due?” she asked. “Tomorrow,” I said. I sighed. “Let’s just go to the movies.” She was stunned. “No, really,” I said, gathering my things, getting my keys, “because I’m not going to figure it out just sitting here.”

We went to an 8 PM showing, I’m sure, because dinner in Hall was at 6 PM. And it was there, at Howards End, that the key to Mrs. Dalloway unlocked: Emma Thompson and her now husband Anthony Hopkins have learned that Emma’s sister Helena Bonham Carter is pregnant out of wedlock. In the garden, Emma is seated as Anthony paces, determining what is best to do. Emma keeps trying to get up, to go to her sister, to try to take action based on her own conscience. To stop her, to take control, the paternal hands of Anthony Hopkins press and press on his wife’s shoulders to keep her seated, to keep her in the garden.

And my mind exploded: there is a scene in Mrs. Dalloway that had puzzled me as to why it was there at all, which is a luncheon to which a certain Lady Bruton has invited Richard Dalloway, Clarissa’s husband, and a doctor (who is treating Clarissa’s nerves). Lady Bruton has a letter she wants to write to the London Times, and her point of view on the issue is liberal, one might say, and feminist. Yet by the end of lunch, the two men have explained to her what she really means, “Oh, do I?” she says, which is the opposite of her original point, and they write the letter for her. Those paternal hands pressing her feminist shoulders to keep her in the chair in the garden. I was saved.

You might look at these saves and think, it’s just a job, or just a class, or just a paper—it’s easy to diminish the experiences, I guess, but that’s not fair to anyone living this life. This is about that thing inside us, the thing that knows and opens and doesn’t fear, that does the work but also lets go to allow the “thing” to come, to be.

It was this that I witnessed in the person of Vice President Kamala Harris at the Presidential Debate on Tuesday night, September 12, 2024. She found the “thing” to rattle the motherfucker Donald Trump: the small size and demonstrable boredom attending his rallies. And from that moment on he was toast.

Lost because of that moment and its aftermath of verbal carnage, lost on the American press, as usual, was Harris’s masterful grasp of complex policy issues, foreign and domestic, none with easy solutions but with clear and important ideas to address and solve problems. After nine years, on the other hand, a clearly demented Trump revealed that as to replacing Obamacare, he has “concepts of a plan.” (As veteran retired high school teacher Tim Walz recounted this at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, “My students had better excuses than that for not doing the work.”) Harris laughed.

Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and I are all the same age. Born in 1964, we are the last year of the Baby Boom, the year before Gen X. As a result, we were both the responsible adults in the room even as children and also the last feral children out playing till dark all summer long; and, in addition, we get all the Monty Python jokes. I feel this in them, the kinship of that cross-section, people who do the work of the grownups but are loose enough to allow the realness to be and with humor. It’s helped sustain Harris and Walz in their brilliant and varied careers, I have no doubt. It’s done the same for me in my less brilliant but no less varied careers, too. Being adult and being real and being funny: it’s saved us.

With Harris and Walz and that generational realness, we have a chance to save this country. We can save it. Let’s save it.

Love,

Miss O’

Miss O’ recognizes, nay, feels, all these teacher faces. Credit to @AnandWrites