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Muses of Madness

Art Spiegelman, Mad Magazine, and my childhood

It’s a pretty wacky Sunday in America in May of 2025. I’m fidgity. Any piece of music I turn on only irritates me—everything sounds too bland, not vital enough, not insistent enough, not loud enough. I feel like I’m turning into a punk teenager at age 60. Even punk feels passe. I’m looking for a revolution.

I turned again to the PBS American Masters episode Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, in which the Maus creator talks about EC (short for Educational Comics, later rebranded as Entertaining Comics), which published not only Mad Magazine but also horror comics like Tales from the Crypt, science fiction by Ray Bradbury, and pulp comics. Spiegelman realized that the horror comics were often by Jewish artists, and that this art was a way of responding to the Holocaust, a Holocaust that no one outside of the Jewish community knew about until the televised Adolf Eichmann trials in 1961. Spiegelman remarks that the key message of EC comics was, “Kid, the adults are lying to you.” This work gave Spiegelman the inspiration to write his classic Maus, using comics to relate the Holocaust experiences of his father. Access to EC and the way it reframed the world, Spiegelman concludes, most likely led directly to students his age protesting against the Vietnam War.

If you are wondering why Trump and his White Christian Nationalist MAGA want to end PBS and all art generally, look no further.

Now, I’m a radical sort of person, but a less assuming, duller radical you won’t find than Miss O’. It’s sad how boring we’ve all become in the white world. Still, the Spiegelman documentary got me thinking about the influences on my own thinking as a child of the 1970s. I’ve told you this. Born in 1964, I remember watching All in the Family when it debuted in 1971, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In in the late 1960s to early 70s, as well as the CBS news with Walter Cronkite every night and The Brady Bunch on Fridays. My family talked about every subject raised on these shows, including the “insipidity” of said Bunch, over dinner or between commercials. In addition to being the only kids in the neighborhood with bookcases, the O’Kids were, should they choose to be, informed. I chose to be, as best I could. And talk about a gamut of subject matter to assimilate—seriously, the 1970s was a great time for me to be a kid, though that wasn’t the case for plenty of other kids. That’s something I learned as I grew. As we do.

And I know I told you this story, how around 1976 or ’77, when I was eleven or twelve, and my tipsy parents would go up to bed on Saturday nights, I was allowed to stay up and watch The Carol Burnett Show by myself. I preferred to watch it with my parents, since they knew all the movie references and explained that the sketch “Funt and Mundane” was a parody of the Broadway legendary couple Lunt and Fontanne, stuff like that, but they gave me great tools to ask questions.

Around that time older boys in the neighborhood, the ones who turned me on to Mad Magazine, told me about other shows, late night fare, daring shows like Monty Python’s Flying Circus on Channel 5 at 11:00 PM; soon I discovered SCTV on my own on Channel 26 (PBS) at 11:30, adjusting the rabbit ears on the set; and then at midnight, I’d physically change the channel to 4 over to NBC’s Saturday Night Live in time for Weekend Update. At 1:00 AM, when many stations went to a test pattern, I’d go to bed. I had a good a thing going until my mom, Lynne, wandered downstairs one night to find me in the dark watching Monty Python. I felt like a criminal. My heart raced.

Lynne, taking over the yellow plaid lounge chair, lit a Salem from her ever-present pack and flicked the top back on her lighter (I can still smell the aromas of menthol and singed lighter fluid). “What are you watching?” she asked. I stammered out the title, trying to shrink on the herculon-upholstered loveseat in the plastic-paneled living room, staring hard at the black and white TV screen. “It’s from England,” I explained. The running sketch of this particular episode was called “Dennis Moore,” about an 18th century bandit who steals lupins from rich people in horse-drawn coaches. The theme song, my mother noted, was from the 1950s TV show, Robin Hood. Oh. By the end, Dennis Moore has taken all that the rich have and given it all to the poor, so the theme song changes from “he steals from rich, and gives to poor, Dennis Moore” to “he steals from the poor, and gives to the rich, stupid bitch.” When I heard “bitch” I thought, “OH NO, this is it, I am in so much trouble,” but Lynne was roaring. “What a brilliant satire of the British tax system,” she said, stubbing out her third or fourth cigarette. “You can watch this show whenever you want.” And she went back upstairs to bed.

And that was it. As a child, as you can see, I didn’t have much to rebel against. My only oppression was the constant fights over my looks—I didn’t have any, and let’s face it, few women do and we look just fine, and my mother was a great beauty. For all her feminism, my mom still fell into that trap of cosmetics and clothes make the woman, thinness is more important than intelligence, “you could be pretty if you tried.” I suffered emotionally over all this nonsense for far too many decades, until my early 30s, when thanks to my therapist I made peace with this particular impasse. I learned that the real sufferer was not me, but my mom. The 1950s did a number on too many women for too many years, oppressing them by making them insecure over their face, hair, nails, weight; but I am beyond fortunate that the artificial beauty thing was the only part of female silliness my mom bought into. Hence, Monty Python and an allowance to buy Mad Magazine.

Sidebar: I told you this story too, probably, how at 32 I lost my natural bloom. I realized this when female students started approaching me, “Miss O’Hara, can we give you a makeover?” When it reached the point of borderline harassment, I mentioned it to my mother (no longer a smoker, but you can picture the cigarette), who said in her sharp, firm voice, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but if you’d wear a little mascara and lipstick, they’d leave you alone.” I thought about it. To press the point, Lynne pointed out and really quite sagely, “Honey, you don’t wear makeup so people notice you, you wear it so they don’t.” Yes, that made total sense.

Oddly enough, I’d created a similar but differently angled line even in my late twenties. I was reminded of it this week when a friend visiting Virginia ran into one of my former students. She recalled the line I gave her when she’d asked why I don’t wear makeup. I said, “I’d rather stun them when I wear it than shock them when I don’t.” Lynne and I were both right. But I learned to keep lipstick in my pocket to refresh between classes (and I do that to this day), and sure enough, the kids never bothered me about my face again. (My hair is another story.)

That dark, twisted humor I loved—a humor that meant I gravitated more to boys than girls for friendship—drew me to a Topps bubblegum series called Wacky Packs, which my brother Pat also collected. I was obsessed with them, as the kids would say.

In the Spiegelman American Masters documentary, I learnedthat Art Spiegelman, who worked for Topps, created Wacky Packs! Wacky Packs was his art, his jokes. What a discovery! I figured I’d ruined my original Barbie and Francie suitcase by plastering the back of the suitcase with those stickers, but I now see it’s even better—and absolutely me, the girl who loved All in the Family and The Brady Bunch, Monty Python and Carol Burnett, Mad Magazine comics and Barbie.

We are, unbelievably, once again living in Holocaust-level dark times, this time in the United States, with Trump openly setting the timer on 250 years of American independence, and on Constitutional Democracy, to end on July 4, 2026, when DOGE expires, and when the 250th anniversary celebration committee expires; and the countdown clock will presumably be reset to 000 to mark the Trump takeover of America. Trump openly denies adherence to the Constitution, flaunts his freedom from the constraints of law, even spreads his lunatic desire to be Pope as well as president. This insanity is beyond the bounds even of The Onion, the inheritor of all the “Kid, the adults are lying to you” Spiegelman-era art.

Addendum to my last post’s prescient Onion headline.

And without artists like Art Spiegelman and the Monty Python troupe and Mad Magazine and Norman Lear, and contemporary creators like the Onion staff and Alison Bechdel, without that satire, that bite, these swipes at the sources of our dysfunction and the most horrific of status quos, I couldn’t survive. No one with sense and decency could.

I hope you are finding your solace on this Sunday, the art that soothes even as it steadies, energizes, and ignites you.

Sending love,

Miss O’

A Vision’s Just a Vision if It’s Only in Your Head

The state of the art of putting us (back) together

It’s Sunday in America, a new, greater America, where already thanks to tariffs, grocery and drugstore shelves are going bare, especially of paper products, because most of our wood for paper comes from (check notes) Canada. So. Fucking. Great. When I’m not freaking out about the country, I focus my mind on art. Then I remember that Trump, who is clearly not really running the country, decided to spend his valuable time to get “elected” by the “board” to head the Kennedy Center, which just two days ago quietly cancelled all LGBTQ+ Pride events for 2025. But because this is Trump, his own big Kennedy Center celebration of his First 100 Days sees him ousted from that same Kennedy Center for “contract violations.” You can make this up.

But really, this shit show is serious. In an interview on Democracy Now, Maria Ressa (6-minute mark), recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, draws disturbingly urgent parallels between the behavior of the Trump and his administration and former president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte, now in the custody of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Trump only learns from the best people. Ressa concludes that if Trump and his FBI and his ICE aren’t reined in by summer, our democracy will be obliterated and most likely for good. She’s just following history.

And the more I read and listen, the more correct I feel I was back in 2020 when I told all the liberals, who are as addicted to Trump as the MAGA who drink his blood, that they/we need to ignore the Big (Burger) King and target the minions who do his bidding, target the structures, and more than that, message the alternatives in actionable, relatable ways, not from On High. For however well-meaning AOC and Bernie are in their Farewell to Democracy tours, and Cory Booker for his stand-ins and sit-ins, they have no actual strategy for saving the country; they do not think like generals, and we need generals right now.

I read about a recent viral Facebook post claiming that Liz Cheney penned a letter saying, “Dear Democratic Party, I need more from you. You keep sending emails begging for $15, while we’re watching fascism consolidate power in real time.” According to Snopes and PolitiFact, there’s no evidence that Cheney wrote it, but you can tell that the average Democrat who probably did is trying hard to get our party’s attention, because Democratic Leaders are so sure they don’t need We, the People, for advice, only cash.

I’ve been trying to understand the Democratic Leadership’s “vamp until ready” stasis. In the theater, the orchestra pit plays music over, and over, or “vamp,” at moments of a show, to cover a set change. In the case of the U.S., there’s a regime change, or a shift from a presidency to a regime, and if this were a show, it would be as if instead of playing bars of music on repeat, the orchestra itself was replacing instruments with jack hammers and table saws.

I mentioned in my last missive that I’ve been rereading Sondheim’s lyric memoirs, and the other night I came across this, and it made me think of the floundering Democrats:

“The point of a tryout is to fix a show, and by the end of the Chicago run, we should have been making changes in the scenes and the songs and the staging. But we couldn’t, because the day after the show opened, Hal [Prince, director] had to go to Germany to receive an award and then leave for vacation. Not that he thought the show was in perfect shape when he left; he simply felt that whatever changes we wanted to make could be accomplished on paper and put into practice later when we went back into rehearsal for the Washington engagement….

“It was a serious miscalculation. We were all experienced enough to know that the time to fix a show is when it’s still raw, before it has started to become slick and rigid, when no one, neither the creators nor the performers, not to mention the audience is satisfied. Without constant attention while a show is taking shape, it doesn’t need many performances before it becomes so efficient that what’s bad becomes acceptable.”

— Stephen Sondheim on the making of the show Bounce, 2003 (from Look, I Made a Hat, 2011, p. 270)

Kids, I think to myself, we don’t have a lot of time to fix this democracy. We have to attack now, while it’s all still raw, while the chaos is still real and awful. Do not relent. Call and email your representatives, keep talking to friends. I long for leadership, but it’s not forthcoming.

As we watch our prices rise and shelves empty because shipments cease, as more and more all of us can only focus on basic survival, the energy for revolution will wane—I think that’s what the MAGA Men and their little MAGA Barbies are banking on—and it can’t. We still have to do that work inside ourselves and push it out.

This week, I happened on an episode of Craft in America on Public Television (soon to be RIP unless we stop it, somehow), in which I saw a quilt artist—that’s right, the photo below is of a quilt. The quilt was based on a photograph of a Nicaraguan garment worker in a sweat shop.

Portrait of a Textile Worker, Quilt by Teresa Agnew

On artist Teresa Agnew, from Craft in America:

“Terese Agnew’s work has evolved from sculpture to densely embroidered quilts by a process she calls drawing with thread. Her themes are environmental and social. Her most notable quilt to date is the Portrait of a Textile Worker, constructed of thousands of clothing labels stitched together, contributed by hundreds of sympathetic individuals, labor organizations, Junior League members, students, retired and unemployed workers, friends, family and acquaintances worldwide. The resulting image is about the exploitation and abuse of laborers, the by-products of globalization and the insatiable American appetite for goods.”

The quilt was created using solely garment labels. Zoom in.

I learned that Agnew found her P.O. box filled day after day with volunteer labels, mostly from people she didn’t know, all women, all who believed in her vision for this piece, her purpose, her message, and in this art form. All these people came together, and Agnew didn’t even know how they learned she was working on the piece.

I think of that artist, and I think of Sondheim, on the road with three iterations of a show that started as Wise Guys, and become Bounce, a decade later finished as Road Show, bit by bit, putting it together, as it were, because it was something he and his collaborators believed in.

If so many people can work that hard to make art that matters, can’t we call work together to demand a nation, a planet, we all want to live on? As Sondheim says,

A vision’s just a vision if it’s only in your head.

If no one gets to see it, it’s as good as dead.

America, your Miss O’ is looking at all of us and thinking, “We need a do-over, a rethink.” Fast. We overproduce all the wrong stuff, overconsume the wrong stuff, overwork in the wrong ways, overpay for the most basic things, like healthcare and rent, and overthink everything about the past instead of overthinking for the present and the future. We need to take all these scattered feelings and thoughts and make, build a national living quilt from all the tattered bit and leftovers, craft it for warmth and strength and beauty for generations and generations.

How many metaphors can you handle this Sunday?

It’s still spring, we are still alive. More to do. Let’s do it.

Sending love to all,

Miss O’

Not Waiting for Directions (Home)

When you just want to do it yourself but can’t

“Dear Saint Anthony, look around, something’s lost and can’t be found.”

~ Catholic prayer to the patron saint of, among other things, lost objects

“When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out ‘stop!’”

~ Bertolt Brecht

“Never start a piece with a quotation.”

~ Nora Ephron

Do you have the feeling that we are all living through a Kafka short story? “The Trial,” perhaps, or “The Refusal,” maybe? When I was home in Virginia the other week, I asked my brother Jeff if he’d ever read Ray Bradbury’s “The Sound of Thunder,” and when I recounted the plot, he realized he once saw a bad movie version; and it came up because, as we caught the latest news out of America, I mentioned that I keep looking for a smashed butterfly on my shoe.

For some reason, I got on a mailing list for Catholic charities and I often receive “free gifts” of amulets and charms and bracelets and necklaces of St. Anthony. Coincidentally, he’s my favorite patron saint.

Like me, in addition to those stories, maybe you are thinking of that Twilight Zone episode, “It’s a Good Life,” where that evil kid keeps wishing everyone who displeases him away to the cornfield, and no one will stop him out of fear, and also love, because his parents choose to save him and let the rest of the world disappear. In the same way, Trump bastardizes the Kennedy Center even as he plans to close or demolish the Museum of African American History, and Musk eyes selling off the National Gallery treasures to “save money.” Wishing all our history away to the cornfield. And, echoing Brecht, there’s no one to stop them.

Or is there? Reading historian Heather Cox Richardson the other day was a tiny balm, as she recounts recent events and sees shifting winds. I’ll take it.

Your Miss O’ has been lying low these past weeks, visiting aged parents, aging brothers, a young nephew and vibrant sister-in-law. Also watching birds, smelling lilac in bloom, watching red azaleas pop, walking around my childhood block in drizzle. In addition to watching classic movies and “Harriet Tubman” on PBS and “Poetry in America” episodes with brother Jeff during the week, I caught A Complete Unknown on my last night, the weekend nephew James visited. James just wouldn’t go to sleep in his designated living room, what with all the excitement generated by middle-aged relatives, so he happily sort of watched the movie with the grownups, not understanding any of it. Fortunately, there’s no nudity and little in the way of bad language, but at the point where Joan Baez gets out of her bed where Bobby Dylan is sleeping, only in her underwear and a tank top, four-year-old James commented, “She forgot to put on her pants.” Uncle Jeff chucked, “He doesn’t miss anything, does he?”

If you haven’t seen that Dylan bio pic, for me the most interesting storyline was the one featuring Pete Seeger, played beautifully by Edward Norton. The movie helped me understand this mystery surrounding the rift that formed between Dylan and his early supporter and champion Seeger. Their link was Woody Guthrie, suffering from Huntington’s chorea at the movie’s opening, the disease never named or explained, as Hollywood does. I won’t belabor the plot, but essentially when Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival, Seeger was dismayed and dejected, not because he hated rock, but because it was the end of his dream. For years and years, Seeger saw in Guthrie, and in the work of folk musicologist Alan Lomax and in folk musicians like Joan Baez and Odetta, the opportunity to proclaim a unifying voice in American music. Amidst the turmoil of the civil rights movement and the communist accusations of HUAC, the folk music movement offered the possibility of a true common ground across race and social class and political affiliation, youth and old age. In Dylan, Seeger saw the last piece of his dream, a young, galvanizing voice, filled with unendingly creative songs of love and political revolution, fresh and original but also connected to our American past.

But Bob Dylan was an artist first, an individual all the way, with no interest in marches or politics, not really, and not at all interested in unifying a nation. The rest is history, Highway 61 Revisited, and unending tension and turmoil in America. This is not Bob Dylan’s fault. Pete Seeger meant well, too, but no single person can make us all believe one “us” to be true.

No one, alone, can fix it.

But if something can unify a people, it’s probably music that comes as close as anything. Music and food. Music and food and complaining about noise.

On Thursday morning this week, around 8:30, as I was working when I heard this high-pitched BEEP BEEP BEEP [beat] BEEP BEEP BEEP. Smoke alarm? Tow truck? Work truck backing up? After about 15 minutes of this blaring through my window, I decided to take a walk hoping the cause of the noise would resolve. One 20-minute walk later, I could still hear the beeps from two blocks away. I went on a fact-finding mission. Where I live is like a mixing bowl of sound—finding the source was a confusion to me. I called 311—a wasted half hour of the operator’s frustrated inability to locate where I was on the city map. Feeling crazy at this point, I texted my co-op group, and neighbor Chris took over, agreed with me it was in a trash bag, rummaged, found the culprit—a discarded smoke alarm!—and smashed it. Oh, blessed relief.

In the midst of ICE raids in America destroying families, there are still annoyances like that, you know what I mean? It’s the thing I’ve never understood, not since I watched the 6-day war on Walter Cronkite’s 6 o’clock news when I was James’s age: what are human beings thinking when they annihilate other humans? We have enough little daily problems, don’t we?

If noise rage occasionally unifies us, language never seems to be able to, because as poet Nikki Giovanni said, too many people try to speak English rather than speak through it. Saturday morning, I had to go get bloodwork and urine testing done for my physical this week. Earlier in the week, I’d received an email that my neighborhood LabCorp office “has closed.” Full stop. I was so bummed—the next closest one is in Jackson Heights, about five subway stops away. Instead, the email continued in the next paragraph, there will be a new office…wait. It’s the same address, but one floor up. God I hate it when people can’t fucking communicate. What the email should have said is, “The second floor LabCorp office is closing for two days in order to relocate to the third floor.” Do you see the difference? Why is this hard? Because it is.

When I arrived at 7:45 for my scheduled 8:00 AM appointment, I saw a packed waiting room—highly unusual, but the office is “new,” so one makes allowances. One man there had a son, probably eleven or twelve and clearly on the autism spectrum, chasing him around, keeping him out of lab rooms, out of the hallway. I went to self check in kiosk but saw this sign:

So I went to the window to check in, as directed. The nurse behind the glass, short, dyed black hair, officious—clearly overwhelmed (like her male counterpart) by the double duty of being a receptionist and the technician, came out to the kiosk and said, “Give me your ID, I’ll do it,” and I pointed to the sign, saying, “If it works, I can do it…,” but she was clearly focused on finishing the check in. Again, I pointed out the sign directing us to go to the window. Did she take it down? No. She straightened it. (My seat being nearby, I spent the next 45 minutes explaining to everyone who came in, “It works, ignore the sign.”)

Between the lying sign, the autistic child flying around, the woman who was denied a pregnancy blood test because she didn’t have a doctor’s order, the men needing drug tests for their jobs, and the seats all facing forward staring into the abyss, I felt I was in some kind of play. Not really Kafka, but rather, Samuel Beckett. I was in a Beckett play. I love to see plays but it’s not always great to live them.

True to my heart, to cheer myself earlier this week, I went to The Public Theater to see a collection of short plays by one of my favorite playwrights, Caryl Churchill. As only an artist can, she captures me in this time, even in America. I think the titles say it all.

And that’s the latest. How’ve you been?

Love to all, somehow,

Miss O’

Et in Arcadia Ego

And in hell, too

Et in Arcadia Ego: The novelist Evelyn Waugh uses this as an epigraph for his novel, Brideshead Revisited. Made into a miniseries ca. 1981, Brideshead was devoured by me and several of my teachers in my senior year of high school, though trying to watch it again a few years back gave me hives, so slow and ponderous was it. This current response speaks to the ways we have all become impatient with time and feeling and characters’ internal lives, as well as with living itself. Today I was thinking about this quote, and Masterpiece Theater host Alistair Cooke when he talked about the interpretation of the epigraph. For a long time, Et in Arcadia Ego was interpreted as, “And in paradise, I,” as if to mean, how lucky I am to be in paradise; but that more recently, it could be said to mean, “Even in paradise, I,” meaning, even in paradise, you can’t get away from yourself, so to speak. Paradise won’t make you feel better if you aren’t already at peace with yourself.

And then of course there is Hell. Lots of people have had views (of it and on it). I’ve been a quote collector all my life, and one of the first quotes I wrote down in a high school notebook, which I gave away and wish I hadn’t, was by John Milton, from Paradise Lost: “The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” My mom, Lynne, quoted that to me, and I had to write it down. Do you do that? It’s a certain kind of eccentricity, I’ve read, that need to ink the words of others, and then hold their words in our hearts.

My mom also gave me this quote from William Makepeace Thackery, from his novel Vanity Fair: “The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.” I do think this is true. The other day a friend came over and relayed his mantra in these times, part of which is, “I am light,” and he’s noticed it’s working, that his light is manifesting, and that people are responding in kind. I’ve been carrying Milton and Thackery as my mantras since I was fourteen; I know their truth.

Last night Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) ended a filibuster of 25 hours and 5 minutes, not reading mindlessly from an encyclopedia like the racist Strom Thurmond, whose record he defeated—ol’ Strom, who I remember being wheeled in post-stroke, incoherent, to “vote” for something that would hurt people (a rolling advert for term limits), filibustered in 1957 was trying to stop a vote on the Voting Rights Act, and he succeeded—but instead letters from actual people who are going to lose their very lives if Social Security ends. And that elected Black man beat that white man at his own game, and with righteousness.

This evening, I heard the Dow has already plunged to the point of total crash in anticipation of Trump global tariffs taking effect—the same type of tariffs that set off the Great Depression in 1930. (The tariffs on Russian goods? 0%. Trump is deliberately bringing America to its knees, to its end, at the demand, it seems, of Vladmir Putin. Why? It’s a shame we don’t have a free press to find out.)

This morning, I couldn’t stop crying. The whole morning, trying to work, I was wracked with sobs, for everyone—for all the migrants and college students and innocent humans whose editorials or simple tattoos are disappearing them into an El Salvador torture prison (and we have them, too, make no mistake) and soon it will be more and more and more and more and more of us. Never to return? Even after acknowledging, “mistakes were made,” ICE and Tom Homan and Trump couldn’t give the dogshit on your shoes. It’s all out of their hands, they say, as they reserve their special places in a hell in which I do not personally believe.

I’m sobbing over the gutting of the CDC, NIH, and branches of state health facilities, all of it, without a single national headline to cover it, the whole CDC facility in Atlanta shuttered today, hundreds, thousands of health professionals out of jobs, even as measles, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases threaten epidemics due to vaccine ignorance.

How do you stop crying when you watch living hell unfold? My power walks are manic. My words here useless.

Talking of faces, of feelings, I think of Oscar Wilde, “A mask tells us more than a face.” What masks do you see in all this? Wilde also said, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” I think of Trump’s press secretary, who stands up straight and shouts louder to demonstrate she knows nothing of the rule of law, the mask that is the all-powerful Trump mouth. I think of all the Trump mouth masks, including Trump’s, that say not one true thing, while ironically telling you how it’s all truly going down.

No one—literally no one, including Senator Booker—has any idea how we stop this. No one has a clue how to make this stop. I have no magic quote to give you, even the great John Lewis’s “good trouble” feels weak. “Be the change you wish to see in the world”? Will Gandhi light that fire?

We, the People, have to do it. We have to throw our words at it, but mostly throw our bodies at it. When we can, how we can. There’s a voice out there, a voice we haven’t heard yet, that is going to rise above all this madness and help guide us. Senator Booker set the tone. But we can’t wait for the next voice.

This April 5, on the day of national protests, I will be on a train headed home to see my aged parents, and it’s long planned and needed, but I feel I’m letting down my country yet again. So I’m writing you this note to tell you I’ll be offline and quiet this next week, but not disconnected.

Be the light, be the love, be the change, be yourself, tell the truth, throw the words, and I’ll do it, too.

Love and light,

Miss O’

The Art of Making Art

A millimeter matters

I just want to say that the luxury of owning a personal library is that not only do I feel cozy all the time, but I get to take evening tours and pick out volumes for bedtime reading. (Growing up, the O’Hara kids were about the only kids in the neighborhood with family bookcases, thanks to our mom, Lynne, having college textbooks, novels, and antique books to display and read.) Even now my number of volumes surprises some people, but I think, who wouldn’t want books around them? They are my closest friends. I saw an interview with Nora Ephron who said everyone asked of her family, “What are you doing with all these books?” (We live in a country like that now.) There’s no reason to finish a volume I peruse, or even read straight through. Sometimes I do that, but many times I just open a chapter and see what it says. If it’s not speaking to me, I flip around. Try another book. Like literary cocktails. It’s fun. This week I’ve been seriously rereading Finishing the Hat, Stephen Sondheim’s first volume of lyrics from his shows, 1953-1981, and so far I’m sticking with it.

When Stephen Sondheim died in 2021, I felt as if I’d lost a friend. Though I wasn’t sure how I felt about his work for a long time, you must know that the key to falling in love with a theater writer or composer is seeing the work, and in a splendid production. It really changes everything. He had three principles that guided his life’s work:

“God is in the details.”

“Less is more.”

“Content dictates form.”

I love that Stephen himself admittedly didn’t always follow them, but we give ourselves a little grace; nobody is perfect. And he himself had favorite lyrics that other people don’t seem to care for. He endured his share of flops and lousy reviews. And he just kept going. Thank god.

In an interesting coincidence, though sometimes I think it’s a bit more divine than that, these associative adventures, I’m also trolling PBS (while we have it) for documentaries and happened on two short ones. First, Marguerite: From the Bauhaus to Pond Farm about master potter Marguerite Wildenhain who, along with her husband, escaped the Nazis and made her way to California to teach pottery; and second, Finding Edna Lewis, about famed chef of 1950s Café Nicholas on E. 53rd St., cookbook author, and unsung mother of the farm-to-table movement, Edna Lewis.

And you might night think that Stephen Sondheim, Marguerite Wildenhain, and Edna Lewis couldn’t have much if anything in common, but you know what? God is in the details. Buckle up.

I’m not really going to recap all their work. But those rules up there apply.

“God is in the details.” Marguerite’s great contribution to many potters was, according to one student, “teaching us how to see.” For example, she’d have each potter make ten or twelve of the exact same pitcher or vase (since potters usually mass produce their work). The student would line them up on a board, and Marguerite of Pond Farm would walk and look and say, of maybe the third one, “This is good,” and of the eighth one, “This is good.” To the student they looked identical. Then she would point out a millimeter of difference in the rim, or the handle, the difference between being beautiful and merely serviceable (I think of the human face). God is in the details. It changed everything for students. (I’m obsessed by details when I direct a show, but not so much when I write, because I’m not an artist when I write.)

“Less is more.” Chef Edna Lewis grew up in Freetown, Virginia. In the Great Migration that took her to New York, she made a living cooking for artists, and word of her home cooking spread. She became an accidental star chef when she partnered (silently, as a Black woman) with two gay men to open Café Nicholas on E. 53rd Street, creating wonderful Southern cooking for writers like Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal. Lewis believed that food should be seasonal and that the ingredients should speak for themselves. Nothing should be overly prepared, overly seasoned, or fancy. You might call it simple home cooking except that her dishes were both gorgeous and delicious, prepared by someone who knew what she was about.

“Content dictates form.” In the theater, the writing and the intent dictate whether something is a play or musical; or whether it’s theater at all. In pottery, the intended use of the vessel dictates the size and shape. In cooking, the ingredients at hand dictate the kind of meal it will be. I’ve been mulling that principle over, and not to get all metaphorical or analogous, but I have to go a little political here. Content (greedy, sociopathic, ignorant bastards) dictates (!) form (evil shit show).

Speaking for myself, I wish I had the talent to be a playwright or a novelist or a poet. I haven’t done theater in years because it’s a collaborative art (it’s not like I can walk around my apartment and “direct”), and collaborating is something I never have time to figure out. But for whatever reason, ever since I was a kid and started writing, I’ve felt I had an obligation to study news events, internalize them, and interpret them for everyone. I don’t enjoy it, necessarily, and will never make a living at it, but I can’t seem to help myself. When asked in high school by the “gifted and talented” program advisor, Mrs. Hubbard, why I kept a journal, I told her I saw myself as a chronicler of my time. She snorted disdain. Years later, when I related that anecdote to my first professor at the Bread Loaf School of English (a summer master’s program designed for teachers), Prof. Cazden snorted almost identically. It was uncanny.

Somewhere in our lives, no doubt, we’ve been made to feel less than. (Both teachers (graduates of Bryn Mawr and Radcliff, respectively) told me without apology, one overtly, the other hoping I’d take her meaning, that I just wasn’t smart enough to be there, whatever that meant. It’s not like I was stupid, exactly, but it’s annoying for brilliant educators like them, I guess, to be around the merely bright when there are geniuses to teach. You know how it is. My response was to say nothing, and my revenge was, I stayed and decided to belong. I really learned a lot. And it all worked out, because as it turns out, they were wrong. Never let them tell you not to dream.)

And so it is that, to this day, I keep feeling this pull to chronicle my times, though to what end I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to solve much—my teachers weren’t wrong about me not being a genius—but you can’t do nothing, in times like these. (Chuck Schumer, is this on?) I try to chronicle what I see and still hold on to the world I want to live in, the world I want us to build. First, obviously, it involves shipping all these the MAGA Nazis from their demented reality show, White House USA, to some tropical island where they live in golden mansions and go on staged hunts with all the guns of their wet dreams and watch all the porn they want without the Covenant Eyes app to pester them. And leave all of us sweet, normal people alone. And let us raise their children.

Until that blessed day, or until I get smarter, I read and write and dream. It’s what we do.

Once more, with feeling, something we can all learn from:

“God is in the details.”

“Less is more.”

“Content dictates form.”

~ The three guiding principles of genius Stephen Sondheim

Love or something like it,

Miss O’

Food, Home, Music

Ways we see some sense, in lists of three

Babies, like you, I am about to simultaneously explode and collapse from rage, numbness, boredom with the stupid, and Dorothy Parker’s “What fresh hell is this?” pounding in my ears, I mean for the LOVE of GOD.

Look, we all of us—all of us—every mother lovin’ one of us—white, brown, black, all the colors; man, woman, trans, all the genders; short, tall, medium, all the heights; ambulatory, prostheticized, wheelchair-bound, all the abilities; Euro, African, American, Indigenous, Indian, Chinese, Korean, all the places; Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, all the faiths–love three things, and I mean LOVE:

1. good food;

2. a comfortable home; and

3. music, whatever that music is.

Watch Home Town on HGTV and tell me you wouldn’t want Ben and Erin to help you make a home for yourself; walk past any bakery in the morning and try to pretend you don’t smell that bread; hear a catchy tune on a radio at the laundromat and not pause and bop. You can’t. Because roots as old as the Big Bang, baby, give us a common consciousness. Eat it.

And for some reason, too many whites in this country think ONLY THEY should have any of those desires, those sensory experiences, those moments. This is insane, it’s psychotic. How do we shake sense into these racist, bereft, sociopaths? Those “Frozen People”? They have become new gold standards for the worst of humanity. Somebody, quick, sick a porch swing, Dolly Parton, and fresh peaches on ’em.

I wish we could cook it out, dance it out, whatever this psychosis is, everybody walking into and out of a Wayfair commercial to create that fulfilling home, and combine all of it into community. It’s all so basic.

Inspired by my friend Susan, who got me making Lists of Three (various categories) and sharing them with her the other night; and colleagues who want to have a Zoom social and talk food, I have listed my dream meals, in honor of Thing One we all love. You’ll pardon me if I’m feeling a need to be elaborate.

Dream Meals

1. Breakfast: my dad’s cheese omelet with American cheese, cooked in bacon grease, with biscuits from The Red Truck bakery in Warrenton, Virginia; coffee from Baruir in Queens.

2. Lunch: the brown bread, Stilton cheese, and tomato chutney Ploughman’s lunch, from the pub in Kent, England, 1992, followed by a cup of Yorkshire tea.

3. Dinner: The fried chicken and collard greens from Mama Dips in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; the hush puppies and sweet tea from the midcentury diner near Seagrove, NC; my mom’s potato salad (sweet relish is the key); fresh-from-the-garden baked sweet potatoes (the way my Appomattox landlady Margaret Stokes from Chesapeake made them), and ice cold fresh sliced tomatoes from the garden.

P.S. Dessert: childhood next door neighbor Frances Christie’s homemade apple pie with the all-butter crust and fresh apples from the Blue Ridge in Virginia.

Dream Home

Very grateful to have been able to build this, over many years, across many lives and houses:

Dream Music

There’s so much not on here, but what can you do? The categories force you to go with your gut. I even surprised myself. (When I lived in my basement during 2017-18, while a friend took my main floor bedroom as she recovered from breast cancer surgery, I missed street noise so much that I found I had to play music on low to sleep. Those CDs? Tony Bennett, The Rodgers and Hart Songbook, and Rosemary Clooney, Songs from the Girl Singer. Every night for nine months. And on the list down there, Rosie was an afterthought; Tony didn’t even make the cut. How?)

Does this get your brain percolating? With a hat tip again to Susan for inspiring me to start remembering all the foods, homes, songs, as well as people and places I like, and the experiences I’ve lived: here’s a little challenge to you, my reader:

In the comments, if you want, give us a List of Three of whatever, no explanations needed, just a label and a list of three. Let’s inspire each other. Let’s connect. Let’s take some recommendations. See what happens.

I could really use reminders of our common humanity. How about you?

Love, love, love,

Miss O’

Present Tense

Possessing words for the times

Hi, sweetie. What a Monday. Between ol’ Def. Sec. Pete texting secret plans for war with Yemen (wtf?) to the Atlantic magazine by mistake (in his defense, it’s hard to multitask when you’re drinking with both hands) and ol’ Pres. Donald explaining to the press that he has no idea what is happening in his administration (in his defense, it’s hard to lead the free world when you don’t give a shit), I’m not feeling exactly safe in the United States.

Words fail me. And yet here I am writing. If you don’t mind, I’ll write what I was going to write about despite our national security in the balance. Because my god, what else can I do?

One of the things in this life I care about most, beyond family and friends and air and water, is language. I’ve tried reading it, writing it, speaking through it, and acting with it. I edit it for my accidental living. There’s so much to try to express, and learning to do it is a lifelong process.

Back in the summer of 2018 or 2019, I think it was, my friend Colleen and I found ourselves doing open mic standup at QED in Astoria, Queens. I only signed up to make Colleen do it, because she is genuinely hilarious and had been making excuses. “I put my name in the bucket,” I told her one Sunday afternoon. She looked at me, “Now I have to do it.” Yep. Use those brainy words.

I am fearless and had a built-in schtick: “Hi, I’m Miss O’Hara, and I’ll be your teacher,” I spoke gently into the mic. “There is nothing you can say to me that a fifteen-year-old hasn’t already said, and with worse grammar.” The first time I introduced myself, I almost burst out laughing seeing all these mostly young white male comics sit up. They literally did that, and I know had no idea they had. I told grammar jokes for four minutes. I was the adorable old English teacher they all remembered having—though I was less of a comic than a palate cleanser between the groups of men, and a gray lady fluffer to set up Colleen’s natural genius.

I probably told you this story, but one Sunday, a young comic, very promising, was working on a routine he’d been practicing for a few Sundays, and it really was getting funnier. At one point he was describing a friend’s plight, crying out, “And his head was squozen…” as he gestured dramatically, and I couldn’t help myself. I began giggling, “Squozen,” I sputtered; and he called out, “Miss O’Hara, what should it be?” and I called, “Squeezed,” and he corrected, “Squeezed!” and finished the routine.

The next week, I saw he was there, and my name got picked from the hat before his did. “I’m Miss O’Hara and I’ll be your teacher,” I began. “Last week,” I breathed dramatically into the mic, “we had an unfortunate incident with a misused past participle.” I glanced at the young comic in his dark corner. “But really, if it’s freeze, froze, frozen, why isn’t it squeeze, squoze, squozen?” I went on to riff on the history of the English language, and needless to add, I killed.

Ha, ha.

But in truth, the venue notwithstanding, grammar is a subject that interests people, isn’t it? We all have questions. English grammar is, to me, a point of common ground. Everyone who comes into contact with English wants to understand the difference between lie and lay, for example, and which pronoun is correct in a compound construction, (me and her? her and I?) that sort of thing.

Here’s a sampling of stuff that we could all correct quickly, if I had a PSA / Schoolhouse Rock platform. This is all off the top of my 38-years-in-English-education head.

1. Her and I want a horse. (She wants a horse + I want a horse = She and I want a horse.)

2. Morty threw a javelin at him and I. (Morty threw a javelin at him + Morty threw a javelin at me = Morty threw a javelin at him and me.

3. This house has been her and I’s dream. (This house has been her dream + This house has been my dream = This house has been her and my dream. NOTE: Don’t say that. Say, This house has been a dream for both of us; or, a dream for her and me, or our dream. And if you must use possessive pronouns, use the correct ones. Doesn’t that feel good?)

4. Lie v. Lay

a. To lie is an intransitive verb. It takes no object. No nouns are harmed in sentences with lie. You lie somewhere; you lie down, you lie across the bed, you lie on the grass; also, you lie like a rug.

b. To lay is a transitive verb. It takes a direct object. You lay a slab of concrete, you lay the shawl on the chair, I lay me down to sleep, lay lady, lay. (NOTE: You lay down your arms, because you lay your arms down.)

c. NOW: here’s the key source of confusion. It’s the tenses.

i. LIE: Today he lies down, yesterday he lay down, tomorrow he will lie down, (over time) he has lain down on the same bed for years. LAY is the past tense of LIE. Crazy, right? And yes, the past participle is have lain.

ii. LAY: Today she lays the concrete slab, yesterday she laid the concrete slab, tomorrow she will lay the concrete slab, and (over time) she has laid concrete slabs for decades.

5. I’m sorry.

Does anyone die (die, died, will die, has died) if you misuse any of these pronouns or verb forms? One hopes not. But every time someone on television, in the media, on a stage, in politics, for example, says in public for the world to hear, “Him and I disagree,” our nation’s reputation deteriorates still further. I really do think the way we care for our language is a reflection of every other thing we care about. You know, like our children.

When we teach our language to our children, we are showing our children that we value that they express themselves. I know all this teaching language talk sounds ridiculous when we live in a nation that couldn’t care less about educating our children in language or anything else; and, worse, whose current government has no problem disappearing babies and children, or causing struggling mothers to die carrying unviable pregnancies, or saying that children with disabilities are unloved; and whose Republican leadership is embroiled in so many scandals involving arrests for child molestation it takes your breath away, gut punch after gut punch.

Internet, sample only. Trump’s one-time “spiritual adviser” was recently arrested. Shocker.

But let’s ban books? Close libraries? Libraries and personal bookshelves and story-times (drag and otherwise) connect all of us to what it means to be human. It’s stories, it’s language that does it. And obviously it doesn’t have to be English—I’ve sat enraptured listening to poems and stories by griots and Native storytellers, and in the audience of Italian operas, where I didn’t understand a word.

But since English is a primary language, and a lot of us speak and read it, I feel that the grammar, then—the learning of it, the doing of the exercises, the practicing of it—connects our national humanity, or can; we feel successful when we learn language and understand the grammar, because everything we learn, we will use in communicating with another person. (Note: AI will never feel good. You know that.)

And if connecting isn’t important, what is? I think I’ll hang out my shingle on a park bench and get started. Let’s talk.

Love or something like it, past, present, future, and tense,

Miss O’

Spring Things

Oh what a tangled web

“Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.”

~ Chief Seattle, ca. 1885

From one of my notebooks, a favorite memory of Miss O’s childhood springs.

Hey, dear. Just a few thoughts this first evening of spring. How is your Thursday?

In the PBS series The Power of Myth, Campbell opens one of the episodes (which I started watching again on television just now) by reading this letter.

Letter from Chief Seattle to President Pierce, 1885 (as read by Joseph Campbell)

The president in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky; the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water how can you buy them? Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect, all are holy in the memory and experience of my people. We know the sap that courses through the tree as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. Perfumed flowers are our sisters; the bear, the deer, the great eagle – these are our brothers. The rocky crests; the juices in the meadow; the body heat of the pony and man all belong to the same family. The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you the land you must remember that it is sacred. Each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water murmurs with the voice of my father’s father. The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst, they carry our canoes and feed our children so you must give to the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.

If we sell you our land remember that the air is precious to us; that the air shares its spirit with all the life that it is supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell you our land you must keep it apart and sacred as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers. Will you teach your children what we have taught our children – that the earth is our Mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth. This we know: that the Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the Earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself. One thing we know; our god is also your god. The Earth is precious to him and to harm the Earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will have happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered and the wild horses tamed. What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires? Where will the thicket be? Gone. Where will the eagle be? Gone. And what is it to say goodbye to the swift pony and the hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival.

When the last red man has vanished with his wilderness and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here? Will there be any of the spirit of my people left? We love this land as a newborn loves his mother’s heartbeat. So if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you have receive it. Preserve the land for all children and love it as god loves us all. We are part of the land. You too are part of the land. This Earth is precious to us. It is also precious to you. One thing we know; there is only one god. No man, be he red man or white, can be apart. We are brothers after all.

This postcard arrived today from my friend Anna in California. How lovely is this?

I was thinking today, for some reason, about how President Biden’s dream, “a cancer moonshot,” he called it, the super-funding of cancer research, was one of the first things Musk’s DOGE defunded; how one of the first of Trump’s deportees was a ten-year-old girl with brain cancer, arrested in an ER in Texas before she could be treated.

If there is a web of life—if what men do to the web, they do to themselves—then perhaps Republicans are a cancer disintegrating the web. Are Republicans a living cancer? Cancer cells, after all, were all once healthy cells. Once a cancer cell begins to convince other cells to join the cancer train, they kill the host. How to convince healthy cells not to turn to cancer? How to convince sick-minded humans to join the planetary brotherhood? How do we enact this cancer moonshot?

Can town halls be a start? Can our voices, together, mend us? How to find our voice?

Campbell tells us that everyone needs a certain hour of day, a certain place, where you can “simply experience and bring forth who you are and what you might be.” A sacred place of incubation. The Native Americans thought of all this earth as a sacred place, all of earth as a place for incubation. Most of us settle for a chair.

It occurs to me on this first day of spring that we all need a breath, a chance to replenish. I hope all these American town halls during the congressional recess are healing some of these wounds, or bringing all this cancer to the fore so the therapy and medicine of sense and empathy can be applied.

Musk and Trump and their acolytes consider anyone who is imperfect, ill, disabled, infirm, aged, or in need in any way to be simply unworthy of life, “parasites,” Musk calls them. It’s a stupid thing to say, especially from a man whose faulty Tesla tanks are being recalled all over the world. After all, everyone is only temporarily healthy, everyone has limitations, but Musk and Christian White Nationalists preach that “empathy is weakness.” In the real world, in real life, empathy is strength, connection, depth of soul, necessary for our mutual survival. Duh.

We know this. We have to cure this cancer.

NYT reporter Serge Kovaleski and the moment Trump’s presidential bid should have ended. I’ll never understand how it didn’t. (“Friends” came on my Facebook wall to defend Trump using their Christianity. “Lisa, I’m a Christian.” I didn’t have any idea how to respond beyond, “Are you high?”)

For a little refresh, let me leave you on the equinox with an affirming poem by an old, white, actual Christian man who knew how to love of all things on earth.

Pied Beauty

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things –

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)

We have to love the dappled things, and also the cancerous ones, the dangerous, the cruel. It’s the hardest part of being human. Suffering is life, after all. Transformation takes time. But there is, somehow, transformation.

Crocuses of Queens, March 20, 2025

Hoping for all good things for your spring,

Miss O’

Erase

When your government wipes your history from its sites

Good morning, sweetie. At 5 AM I saw a text from my friend Susan, a humor piece from McSweeney’s:

IT’S A SHAME WE HAVE TO BETRAY OUR ALLIES, STARVE THE POOR, HALT SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS, DESTROY THE ENVIRONMENT, AND ELIMINATE THE FREEDOMS ENSHRINED IN THE BILL OF RIGHTS, BUT AT LEAST MY INVESTMENT PORTFOLIO IS ALSO TANKING

by TALIA ARGONDEZZI

It would be truly laughable if it weren’t really happening.

From one of Miss O’s little notebooks. Musings.

As you know, I live with a disturbed mind, born as I was a middle brow Cassandra, driven mad at times by unwanted prescience, the way (for example) even as I was moved by and marveling at Hamilton and Suffs on Broadway (some ten years apart), I knew they were not celebrations but elegies. It’s not for no reason that I felt that way: those shows bookended the beginnings of not one but two Trump terms.

As testament to my madness, I’ve found myself laughing at our Senate all these weeks, both Democrats as well as Republicans, holding all those “confirmation hearings,” because somehow the Democrats couldn’t see (and still can’t) what all the rest of us outside the Capitol Bubble could and can, that these nominees are being sent in to dismantle and erase our democratic republic. Senate Minority “Leader” and traitor Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is genuinely baffled as to why he had to cancel his “book tour” due to threats. House Minority “Leader” Hakeem “I don’t know” Jeffries (D-NY) had to cancel his little book tour, too. These two “leaders” haven’t been successfully doing shit to defend the republic for years (what did they even write about?), and yet think now is the time to take victory laps. They have, essentially, erased themselves from history even as Trump’s minions of white supremacy literally erase the achievements of women, Blacks, Native Americans, and all other minorities from all government databases.

In further erasure, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has fired all women and Blacks from senior military leadership. Today I read that the Dept. of “Justice” has given President Trump the green light to fire all women from leadership positions in government. Trump humpers have no sense of history. It’s so childish, isn’t it—like the way kids think their mom won’t notice the broken vase if they put a tee shirt over it—only now the stakes are life and death, civilization vs. barbarism.

There is a poetic technique called erasure, in which the poet takes an existing text—something out-of-print, say, an old book, or a magazine—and maybe circles the words that strike her fancy or uses a pen to mark out words she isn’t drawn to. Whatever words remain can be shaped into a poem, using the words in the order she finds them, or rearranged. (Poet Amanda Gorman has a section of her collection, Call Us What We Carry, dedicated to this technique.)

My friend Katrinka Moore has a collection of poems inspired by this technique, and it’s still my favorite of her many books, Thief. In a few places, she reveals not only the found poem but the process.

From Thief by Katrinka Moore BlazeVOX [books], Buffalo, NY, excerpted here to encourage you to buy it.

I think a technique like erasure shows us that do what we will to erase a text, there is something still to draw us in, a word we simply cannot let go of, another word, language that helps us reveal something new. The text is not the same, but nor is it lost.

Aren’t there parts of your life you’d like to erase? I have quite a list. Or have you thought you’d erased something, and then one morning, out of a dream, or from a knock on the door or a text on the phone, there it is, the past? Because that’s how life works, isn’t it?

Reading Joseph Campbell, as you know I have been, I’m reminded how mythology teaches us that no amount of annihilation, erasure, or running away can move us past the past, or past guilt, or spare us a reckoning. The story of Oedipus (whom the Oracle of Delphi prophesied would kill his father and marry his mother, and so whose parents cast him out as a baby, only to have him adopted and live to do that very thing), to take one example, teaches that one meets one’s fate in the path one takes to try to avoid it. You’d think humans would catch on; but in the West we have lost our mythologies.

To take another example, the First Council at Nicaea in 325 A.D. tried to force Christianity into tight constraints of how to believe and worship, and cast out and buried the so-called Gnostic Gospels, especially the Gospels of Thomas and Mary Magdalene, whose testimonies of Jesus’s teachings could not have run more in opposition to the Nicene religious oppression that is what the world now knows as Christianity. (If God is in your pocket, and if everyday men and women can equally teach and preach, you don’t need a patriarchy or a church; and you realize how truly radical Jesus was, and how close to the Buddha, to erase authoritarianism.)

But those Gnostic Gospels were uncovered in 1945 in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, because you know what? Try to erase what you will, the truth surfaces. Anyone who has suffered a trauma knows it has to be dealt with someday. There are only so many boxes you can keep putting in the closet before the closet explodes. Pick a metaphor.

Like Christianity, whatever was intended, our democracy (however imaginative) was founded on genocide, on slavery, on the subjugation of women. Do what they can to erase a people and history, people survive, history will out. Do what they can to shackle, people break free. You can’t erase that spirit. How is it that oppressors still think, in 2025, that erasure means obliteration? Yet we can’t quite erase authoritarians, either. We are all thieves, I guess, stealing what we can to make our worlds, always a price to be paid. Ask Prometheus. But some thieves are righteous. Ask Jean Valjean.

In one of my little notebooks, I took an erasure poem I made and illustrated it; I did a second one with cut out words. There’s something calming about the process, I think, because of what is revealed in our attraction to certain words. Should you try it, and I hope you do, let me know what you reveal.

Sending love, unerasable,

Miss O’

Pattern Cutting

Reflections on art and life in the age of American Surveillance

Today, in the wake of all the grave threats facing anyone opposed to the Trump administration—citizen or noncitizen, federal worker or civilian, famous or ordinary, —even normal people just traveling, like the just-released woman from British Columbia traveling to the US from Mexico detained in a cement cell with thirty women, fed on cold rice for the past two weeks, no regular access to a toilet, with no due process (one woman in her cell has been there for 10 months with no hope of leaving, no one to help her); or like the British tourist who was arrested while backpacking in Seattle, detained and still not charged (both women white, English-speaking, without criminal records)—in the wake of all this, as I say, a friend of mine asked me if I was going to continue to write my letters on Substack and WordPress.

Yes.

As Trump invokes the Enemy Aliens Act and carries out the wet dream of White Christian Nationalists that is Project 2025, no one is safe. Do or do not, be important or not, be famous or not, be humble or not, be a child or an adult, a Democrat or a Republican, pardoned or not, Trump friend or foe, literally no one is safe from all this. (Did you see Sophie’s Choice? How many times do you have to read the fucking “First They Came” poem?) The sadistic joys of kidnapping, detention, torture, and, no doubt, eventual killing are endorsed by fully 37% of American citizens. They are willing participants and apparently glorying in the promise of the end of the democratic republic. They whine when they are personally affected, sure, but as one Nebraska rancher I heard on Instagram said—and she is losing everything and voted for Trump—she’d do it all again. You cannot fix this level of stupid, you cannot fix sadists. All you can do is outnumber them, out kind them, out organize them. Outlove them. And die trying.

It’s the absurdity of it all I cannot fathom. In a recent episode of this season’s Finding Your Roots, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., reveals to actress Debra Messing the truth about the fate of her Jewish-Polish ancestors in Krakow. One such relative, a pattern cutter in a garment shop, was among those killed in the Holocaust. In a moment of what scholar and philosopher Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil,” conscripted Nazi soldiers carried out orders and exterminated simple working people in Poland and elsewhere, people they didn’t know, for no particular reason other than they were told to. Ordinary working people.

A pattern cutter. In a little garment shop. In Krakow. And his wife, and his sister. Messing had no idea.

Tom Stoppard, in his Broadway play Leopoldstadt explored his own discovery of Eastern European uncles and aunts and cousins who were murdered in the Holocaust. The play, which I was lucky enough to see—it was stunning—was performed over two and half hours without intermission. Why no break? Because the audience would have walked out, baffled by banality, after Act I. The family, ca. late 1800s, was so…ordinary. Middle class, an affair maybe, a little business trouble; a simple holiday blending Christian and Jewish traditions, having dinner. That was the whole point. When the play shifts to 1955 in Act II, they are all dead. A relative is reckoning with this horror and the audience is, too.

It’s just insane.

No one could have been less important than a Romanian boy of 15, Elie Wiesel, and his family, as described in the memoir Night. The inhumanity and terror of the Holocaust has been so well-documented by survivors like Wiesel and others, like Primo Levi, that you cannot honestly believe we are reliving those exact times. And in the United States of America, too many of whose citizens died fighting Nazis, it’s unthinkable.

Yet here we are.

At 59E59 Theater in Manhattan before the election, I saw Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library. (The promo material gives away the play’s surprise, that Mrs. Stern is Hannah Arendt, which is I guess because they didn’t trust the audience to know who she was.) The play gave me all the awful prescience that we were about to face the same interrogations Arendt endured; yet by gaining the empathy (there’s that evil word for which Elon Musk and his army of Christian white supremacists will have us all murdered) of her Nazi interrogator, Arendt was aided in an escape over the border. She famously went on to report on the Nuremberg Trials and warn us about how regimes like Trump’s form. Her books should have been text books in American high schools.

Screenshot

Last summer (I wrote about this somewhere already), I was lucky enough to see the play Here There Are Blueberries, a true story, wherein researchers at the National Holocaust Museum found themselves gifted, quite problematically, with a photo album of Nazi officers and their secretaries having the time of their lives at Auschwitz. Not an inmate in sight. The photo in the promo material is of a group eating blueberries, in a spot that was not far from the ever-burning crematorium, all smiles, not a conscience among them.

From Here There Are Blueberries by Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, 2024, New York Theater Workshop, NYC

A few years back, I saw the final preview of a Taylor Mac comedy, Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, in which a Roman slave, played by Nathan Lane, begs his two fellow slaves to stop preparing all the dead for burial. Let them rot—how else will all these Romans quit having wars? If we keep doing the dirty work, if we don’t unionize and end this complicity, how will it ever stop?

The two women keep embalming. (I think our audience was the first one to get it, and maybe the first night the play fully came together, because you could see the cast was stunned at our screaming standing ovation; the critics panned it, having seen the play before it was ready to be seen. And wow is it timely now.)

I think also of a fabulous Broadway revival of a play in verse called La Bête, in which Mark Rylance played a charming, verbose rube who talks the king in a 17th century court into making him the new court playwright, and David Hyde Pierce played the snobbish playwright who is unseated. In the final moments of this hilarious and frenetic farce, the audience realizes that in fact Pierce’s character is right, and Rylance’s character is in fact a deceptive, cunning, dangerous beast who will bring down the order with his appointment.

And my god, here we are.

It’s through the theater that I process life, even prepare for life. The way some people look to scripture I look to playwrights, to the artists always, as guides on what was, what may be, what to do, how to behave, what to dare in our increasingly dark times, surrounded by confusion and cowards, facing unending threats and evils everywhere we look.

And these monsters are just getting started.

UNLESS. Unless. Unless. Unless.

It’s a big ask. But we can’t give up.

Love,

Miss O’