What Would You Like for Crunch?

A few reflections on my mom, Lynne

Lynne died almost two months ago, on June 5. The other day I had an email from my friend Anna, who told me she thinks of my mom when she’s looking for something crunchy to go with her meal. When Lynne packed a little lunch for me to take on the train, a gesture she stopped doing in the five or six years before she died (not through lack of love but lack of energy), she’d ask, “What would you like for crunch?” (It usually came down to carrots or Cheez-Its or chips.) My mom was a strikingly picky eater, something I didn’t think much about, but noticed more than I was consciously aware of. In her last couple of years, down to 80 pounds and not out of bed too often, I’d see my dad, Bernie, running up and down the stairs from the bedroom, reheating her plates of small meals in the microwave—if the temperature was too cold, she’d stop eating, and desperate for his wife to eat, Bernie would warm it up. My brother Jeff is the same way—the food has to be the right temperature or he doesn’t want it.

By contrast, Bernie eats his spinach right of the can he just opened; I eat leftover Chinese chicken and broccoli out of the container from the fridge. Hot, cold, lukewarm (sidebar: I just realized I have no idea where lukewarm came from, so you’re welcome), it’s food. That said, both my dad and I have to have our coffee steaming hot or we don’t want it.

But one thing we O’s all agree on is that each meal should have a contrast of textures—something with a good chew, something soft, something with crunch. A little salt, a little sweet. I imagine that any human would agree on that—it’s something that makes grilled chicken nachos (topped with melted cheese, black beans, guacamole, salsa, and sour cream) a perfect dish (and luckily I enjoy them even as they get a bit soggy and cool over a long visit with friends).

And really, in a world of so few universals, you’d think we could agree that one of life’s great pleasures and purposes is to have the food we love, the way we want it, when we need it. After clean air and fresh water, and right before safe shelter, fine nourishing food of appropriate temperature and texture and taste is right up there. I find it sickening that anyone could deliberately starve any creature. I can’t stop thinking about this, and Lynne would feel it, too.

For whatever pleasures or pickinesses Lynne experienced in eating or not eating, she saw as one of her prime duties the feeding of her young. “So you have a ham sandwich on whole wheat and a Clementine,” she’d say, putting the Glad bag and napkin into the paper sack. “What do you want for crunch?”

I love that this stuck with Anna. Lynne seems to stay with people, and mostly through my stories. I’m glad I tell stories.

My friend Colleen sent me a card a few weeks back, offering condolences for the death of my mom, and remarked in the card that when I talked of her and told stories, I spoke of her as “Lynne,” never as “Mom” or “my mother,” and Colleen wondered why that was. Talking to my dad recently, I relayed this observation and said, “I always saw Mom as a person first, and my mother only incidentally.” He thought that made sense. I see Bernie the same way, a person first. They both made it clear from the beginning of all their kids’ lives that their marriage came first. “You kids can go to hell,” my dad said more than once during various moments of his children’s sometimes troubled adolescences, “all I need is your mother.” And it was true.

Back in 2022, my dad had surgery for the first time at age 88 to remove a mass (non-cancerous as it turned out) in his colon. This would turn out to the be the last year that Lynne was really mobile, and even then it was limited. Here’s from my sketchbook of that time:

I told you this I’m sure, but before I took the train down to Virginia from New York the week of the surgery, Lynne asked, “Why are you coming?” My brother Jeff lives with them, but he works a labor job, and as an editor I can work from anywhere. She still didn’t see the point. I knew that after a major operation that there was no way Bernie could lift, open, or otherwise help with anything, and that my mom was too weak to turn doorknobs. (I’m not kidding: years ago my father (who is a neat freak, so this was hard for him, I know) started leaving all the closet doors ajar, and even made the toilet paper hang long so it would be easy for his wife to reach; it wasn’t until after Lynne died that I realized why all that was.) And if you are waiting for your parents to realize they need you, that is not happening. So you go. A few days after my arrival, Lynne looked at me hard and said, “How did you know?”

During his recovery, in Bernie’s unstoppable neat freak rush (he is famous in the family for breaking and chipping every plate, glass, cup, mug, ornament, you name it, that he touches), he broke a precious object. Poor Lynne had a vase she was really fond of, at least 50 years old, and one morning I came downstairs to hear Lynne yelling, “How on earth did you break that?” And Bernie is yelling, “Well I had to pull the shade down,” and she’s yelling, “Why? There are curtains there, and I really loved that little vase.” It had been nearly 60 years of suffering the sloppiness, and yet all the love, you know?

So I went online, and I searched. And it took some time, but I found it. The exact same vase. I gave it to them for their 59th wedding anniversary. Neither of them even noticed its return. Ha, ha.

The best reason for Google.

Bernie and Lynne. I knew people growing up—good buddies and neighbors—who would say that their mom or their dad was their “best friend.” I found that creepy. Once when I was in middle school, or maybe early high school, Lynne said to me out of the blue, “You don’t care that we aren’t friends, do you?” I didn’t hesitate in saying, “No,” because Lynne raised her kids to be independent creatures, even as she fed and bathed us and took us to the dentist twice a year. It worked for the O’s.

At a reunion of my dad’s side of the family out in Iowa and Nebraska nearly 30 years ago, my youngest brother Mike told a girl cousin (one of 37 living) that we weren’t really raised with hugs. She asked, “How do you raise kids without hugs and kisses?” When we got to our Uncle Al’s farm, five of her six children walking toward our cousin’s Aunt Lynne, who walked purposefully to greet us with a wave and a back pat, Mike said, “We don’t hug, do we Lynne,” and our mom declared in perfect time, “No we don’t.” Our cousin gaped.

Hugs and kisses are nice, but some of the most screwed up people I’ve known in my life had all of that and a mom or dad for a best friend. You know. Every family is different, the needs are different, no one does it perfectly. The hot and cold, the bitter and sweet, the soft and the crunchy—I’m grateful for the textures Lynne brought to our lives, for the nourishment she gave, for the smarts she had. We may not have been smothered in kisses, but because of her, the O’Hara kids know injustice when we see it, and we are not afraid to call it out.

Crunch.

Sending love,

Miss O’

Erasure Augmentation Fragmentation

Fragmentation Erasure Augmentation

I learned

in channel flipping

David Bowie assembled phrases and words

on strips of paper

cut from texts or written out

by hand

strips

arranged

at random

his listeners

called them lyrics

Bowie called it fragmentation

performed it to music

we danced

Katrinka Moore’s Thief

assemblage

poetry

taken from texts

through the process of erasure

makes meaning

different

same

fragmentation

makes you resee

text inside text in potential

and you find yourself

trying it out too

Earthquakes lightning strikes volcanic eruptions

flash floods and flash mobs

instead of FEMA

overrun by

concentration camp

guards worth more than teachers

pledge allegiance

pedophiles more revered

than field workers

In fragmentation

our country

our short attention spans

short circuited by shock

no common culture

no common causes

only

my tower of Babel

Our task

to augment with words

fill join complete connect

the empty spaces

make beautiful meaning

uncovering in the erasure

what was erased

only better

It’s not stealing

if the words and spaces move you

if the word spaces make you cry

if the words spaces open

the possible

Miss O’s Fragmentation Booklet, with apologies and gratitude to Anton Chekhov

Artists

anticipate

are attuned to

act out

splintering fracturing factioning

the fragmenting

all our children will know

of this life

this world

is hate heat hardship

or is it

cut a strip

erase

augment

give it a good beat

hold it out to me

let’s dance

In memoriam, Andrea Gibson, 1975-2025.

Some Art Belongs in the Kitchen

Art as Independence Day

I started this missive sitting in my Queens living room, hours after the Big Beautiful Bill passed the House, again, and for all time; windows open, ceiling fan going, storms on and off, listening to The Land of Hope and Dreams Tour, Bruce Springsteen live in Manchester, May 14, 2025. God I love this artist, wobbly voice and all—all the artistry is fully there, the heart, the defiance of authoritarianism, the humor, the joy. Bruce is all that is good in America, or was, or can be. Can you imagine anyone—any sentient working American human choosing to throw their lot in with a monster like that whiny nepo baby Trump poser president over a true American like Springsteen, son of working class Irish and Italians, creator of some of the greatest songs of the 20th and 21st centuries, who is living out a true and mythic American Dream—rock star—through his own talent and hard work? I really can’t.

And here we are.

I know I’ve written about this before, about the importance, culturally in America, of The Ed Sullivan Show. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Ed presented an hour-long weekly variety show that had it all—the ridiculous magic tricks and comedy of low vaudeville to Broadway musical moments, opera, and popular music all the way to the Rolling Stones; the performers were whites, Blacks, Hispanics, young and old, men and women, everyone. It was a total melting pot of America, and it was in all the living rooms of anyone who could afford to own a television set and all their visiting friends who couldn’t. Common culture. Sure, there was the KKK and horrific shit all around, but no one really looked down on or was suspicious of anyone for loving both Johnny Cash and Leonard Bernstein. There was room and respect for both.

And no one, or few, back in the day, really didn’t want their kids to get an education. Thanks to public education, I read, the literacy rate was 80% by 1875. And that is an extraordinary achievement. All that advancement, one we have taken for granted, now could rapidly change.

Look, I know there are snobs all around, hurting others’ feelings, from Meryl Streep’s dissing wrestling on an awards broadcast to Donald Trump’s hatred of anything culinary beyond fast food. But the thing is, the free radio and the free television allowed equal access to all the art, so-called high and low—regardless of where you came from, you were allowed to discover and enjoy cartoons and classic films, sitcoms and crime dramas, bluegrass and jazz and opera. Whatever. Libraries made books free to read. Schools had kids do art shows. Everybody could go.

The shame of “high art,” as it’s often framed (as it were), from painting to classical music, is that all the plush carpet and crystal seems designed to make viewers and audiences either of it or not of it. The maestro Leonard Bernstein, a Jewish bisexual composer and conductor and communist, wanted to open up all that classical music to everyone, and did so with his New York Philharmonic family and children’s concerts, radio broadcasts, and a television variety show, too.

Sure, some music feels right in symphony halls, some on back porches; some art is best encountered while in the care of a museum, and some art fits just right on the wall of a bar. I want to live in a country where all of that is okay with everyone, and everyone enjoys access.

A few years ago, I bought some art by my talented friend Jodi Chamberlain. One thing she suggested about her current work, and which I passed on to my friends for whom I’d bought her pieces as gifts, “My art does really well in kitchens.”

And it really does. It’s a very cool thing to recognize about one’s work. You might think all art belongs in a curated living room, but really a kitchen is a totally wonderful place to have art. It’s underrated as a location.

Julia Child by Jodi Chamberlain, ca. 2022, collage, ink, color on paper.
My friend Richard with his new art, perfect for dishwashing contemplation.

The arts are and ever were the great civilizers, with civilization coming from the Latin root, “civilis,” meaning “relating to a citizen,” and also, “courteous.” Hence, civilized. There’s a thought. At some point not long ago, the National Endowment for the Arts became a Republican cudgel, the arts being blamed for all of the problems of a world that included (gasp) everyone. Sesame Street was radical in teaching all children letters and numbers, Mister Rogers too kind and loving. You know, un-American. Unlike blood sucking billionaires, who paradoxically fund a lot of the arts, so there’s that.

Back in October of 2020, when Trump (whose idiocy had killed some one million citizens during Covid) was running for re-election, Bruce Springsteen read Elayne Griffin Baker’s poem on his radio show, the poem that begins, There’s no art in this White House, and his reading is as important as Baker’s words:

There’s no art in this White House.

There’s no literature, no poetry, no music.

There are no pets in this White House, no loyal man’s best friend, no Socks the family cat, no kids’ science fairs.

No time when the president takes off his blue suit red tie uniform and becomes human, except when he puts on his white shirt and khaki pants uniform and hides from the American people to play golf.

There are no images of the First Family enjoying themselves together in a moment of relaxation.

No Obamas on the beach in Hawaii moments, or Bushes fishing in Kennebunkport.

No Reagans on horseback, no Kennedys playing touch football on the Cape.

Where’d that country go?

Where did all the fun, the joy and the expression of love and happiness go?

We used to be the country that did the Ice Bucket Challenge and raised millions for charity.

We used to have a President that calmed and soothed the nation instead dividing it, and a First Lady who planted a garden instead of ripping one out.

We are rudderless and joyless.

We have lost the cultural aspects of society that make America great.

We have lost our mojo, our fun, our happiness, our cheering on of others.

The shared experience of humanity that makes it all worth it.

The challenges and the triumphs that we shared and celebrated.

The unique can-do spirit that America has always been known for.

We are lost.

We have lost so much in so short a time.

– Elayne Griffin Baker

Art is where it starts, where life starts, where civility starts: without a love of the arts, there is no love of humanity. Without an appreciation of human craftsmanship, there’s no respect for any human endeavor beyond destruction. Wrecking balls are easy—the toys of little boys.

And once again, in 2025, we are lost; not only lost, utterly unmoored and alone out at sea, morally, ethically, practically. It’s horrible.

Bruce Springsteen is my favorite kind of artist because his music can reach anyone; he can play dive clubs, massive stadiums, and Broadway with equal facility. All the great artists can do this. And great artists want all the audiences, every cross section, to join in. In Putting It Together, James Lapine’s memoir of the creation of the Broadway musical Sunday in the Park with George, one of the actors recalled seeing Johnny Cash in the front row of one of the previews, and they all were excited and also worried he’d leave after intermission—and so happy when he didn’t! I love that. Thinking of that musical—one of everyone’s favorite movie scenes is the Art Institute of Chicago montage of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, featuring the pointillist painting on which Sunday in the Park is based. Art, as director John Hughes knew, really is for everyone; in an interview, Hughes called that museum his “refuge” as a kid.

You know who doesn’t want everyone to engage with art? The autocrats, the controllers, the fascist creeps. They will do anything they can to prevent you, the people, from knowing about, engaging with, or being moved by art. Because they are afraid of it. Books, drag shows, finger painting, Broadway. The autocrats are terrified of art, I think, because they might have a feeling they cannot name or control, and there won’t be a starving refugee nearby to take it out on when they do.

I have this fantasy of rounding up all the MAGA leaders and the Heritage Foundation cultists and the architects of “America First” redux, putting them all in Depend diapers, tying them to lounge chairs, muzzling their mouths, and forcing them to watch and listen to loads of cultural things that would both expand and nourish their souls, like all day and all night. Bruce Springsteen live, obviously; David Bowie singing “Fame” on Soul Train; Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake; Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach; maybe the documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, the classic film Casablanca, James Baldwin on Dick Cavett; so many singers and musicians, surely Nina Simone; Hamilton. There is just SO MUCH joy to be had. I might open with Mister Rogers talking to them all from his old shows, telling them about love, to look for the helpers. Close with Johnny Cash’s video “Hurt.” On a loop until their hearts explode.

Their empire of dirt, indeed.

I just watched again the American Masters episode on Janis Ian, whose song “Society’s Child,” written at age 13 about an interracial relationship ca. 1962, was a revelation to me. Ian toured Apartheid South Africa in the late ’80s with an integrated band and demanding integrated audiences and hotels—and she got them. Though punished for two years by the United Nations, she said she didn’t believe in cultural boycotts because who knows whose heart might be changed by the music. Apartheid ended in 1994, and who’s to say her art didn’t help that along?

Too many in America fear information as well as art. It’s important to remember that art is not about information, it’s about wonder, about contemplation, reflection. Mister Rogers talks about that. All the noise of this world. There’s such meanness, too. Art can be such a restorative. Why can’t people focus on all that beauty and wonder and just leave poor immigrants alone? Because we know, don’t we, that if these malcontents and malicious assholes had art in their lives, they might be less afraid of learning all kinds of things, and they’d be more peaceful, maybe. All I know is that all my circles of friends and family love cultural things, and we are fun and kind people who never ever think of new ways to kill and cage “other” people. Go, us.

So on this Independence Day, perhaps our last, I’m going to meditate on a way of life that makes me happy, filled with art and music and funny people. Art takes you outside yourself as a way of going back inside yourself, only deeper, and you come out again, only different, better. And then you do it again.

Art by Jodi Chamberlain, ca. 2022, Covid times tourists, NYC

Remind your friends, art is everywhere, at all kinds of prices, and you can put your art finds anywhere you want. Go get some art. Move it around. Try out all the rooms.

Miss O’s kitchen, with assorted art.

Maybe start in the kitchen.

Love,

Miss O’

Past to Present

Revisiting Life on The Miss O’ Show

Back when I was a high school English teacher, and a kid would say the craziest thing, I used to joke, “Someday, when I do my one-woman show, The Miss O’ Show, I will share this moment.” When blogs became a thing, I came late to the game on Blogger in 2011 with The Miss O’ Show, where I used the space mostly to write about teaching and creating curriculum, but it veered into political lectures and observations. I lost my way, and I stopped. Around that time, I found WordPress, and thought I’d start fresh with The Miss O’ Show (Teacher Edition). When I lost my way there, too (because what was I teaching?), I moved over to Substack (duplicating posts) with The Miss O’ Show: Reading Glasses. I’m still not sure what is what or what for. This morning when I searched “The Miss O’ Show,” the first thing that came up was a skin care guru named Olivia, no apostrophe, whose videos are called The Miss O Show. Well, darn.

It seems it’s time to give up my handle, but since I own the domain name missoshow for those blogs on Blogger, WordPress, and Substack, I may as well keep them, understanding that with AI, what we know as writing (like reading in the age of audio books) may be destined to become old school, not unlike the shift from cave paintings to papyrus, from scrolls to bound books. Only this time, humans have created artificially intelligent communication and search technology that requires the sacrifice of all our potable water to cool the engines, causing humanity (and indeed life itself) to die off possibly as early as 2027. (When asked about this in an interview, fascist and Palantir Technologies founder Peter Thiel merely mumbled something to the effect of, “So?” God we’re dumb.)

Nature will out, and it’s reassuring. Queens.

Looking at our increasing human lust for self-immolation, tied now inextricably to the way Thiel’s tech eats all our words online in order to cause the end of earth through endless iterations of regurgitation, not unlike the end of Mr. Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, the act of writing feels increasingly weird. On my way to Joe’s Pub in the East Village the other evening, I went into the Strand Bookstore on Broadway, as one does, and was overwhelmed as usual by all the volumes I’ll never read, classic and contemporary, on every subject you can imagine, enveloped wall to wall by self-referential merch. What are humans even doing? We’ve never known so much, and absorbed less; or should I say, lived less? Or should I just shut up? Should all of us?

And then I reread Whitman:

This poem always comes to mind when I get nauseated by the too-muchness of it all, all the data and breaking news; all the self-care videos and nonstop commercials; all the words.

In Union Square, before heading to the Strand, I found one of my favorite artists, Akassa, two of whose works I own, just to say hello. It was Thursday, and I remembered it was his Union Square day. He remembered me, and smiled, and there he was with even more beautiful work, and the first thing I said when he asked how I was was, “My Mom died June 5,” and he was so sympathetic I got teary. I tell most everyone that, not because I want sympathy so much as connection, to bring us to the real, the now, the human, the living, the alive. And we shared that. And leaving the Strand, walking into the first cool air in a week in New York City and my first time walking New York for itself since coming back June 11, I became present to an overcast dusk that reminded me of London, a man walking toward me, feeling for something in his pocket, then turning abruptly around, crossing the street to go back, I think, to Wegman’s in Astor Place. I found myself hoping he found it, whatever it was. Something about the way he searched, realized, and turned was recognizable and immediate, if you know what I mean. I miss observing like this.

I was early to Joe’s Pub, so after picking up my ticket I headed around the corner on E. 4th Street to the pub Swift, where I haven’t been since at least before Covid. The last time I was there was an early summer afternoon, where I read Patti Smith’s M Train while sneaking Lower East Side deli knish out of a paper sack as I sipped a Smithwick’s (which they no longer serve, I see). (Sidebar: Outside my window just now I heard a little girl say, “Why?” and her daddy reply, “Because people don’t usually order pizza at eight in the morning, babe,” and I found myself thinking, “But we eat it cold out of the fridge then, so that little girl is not wrong, is she?” My upstairs neighbor, Debbie, just went out to roll the compost bin around to the other side of our building, her self-selected Saturday chore to help the co-op, while I remain in a bed I’ve been in since last evening at 6 PM, because lately bed is the only place I want to be. But life goes.)

So back to Swift, I watched the bartenders working hard at pouring the draft pints of Guinness; I looked at the barstools filled with white bruhs in blue button-down shirts or similar, not one conversation worth eavesdropping on, finished up and left. Outside, I see I missed a sudden downpour. At the Public, I used the restroom, passing a very tall young woman at the mirror, brushing and brushing some kind of foundation powder into her face, and she was still at it after I flushed and washed my hands and dried my hands and went out the door. What is that about? I wonder. It’s funny being in my sixties, a plump old broad no one looks at anymore if they ever did, and they never did, and no amount of foundation powder was going to give them a better view, it’s all so surface and silly. Inside Joe’s Pub, still quite early, I ordered my drinks from my server, Izzy, a slender young man with a friendly face and joyful afro. “Izzy, I’m a cheap date,” I said, showing my Supporter ticket (giving me 15% off). “My mom died a few weeks ago, and this is my first night out since.” Izzy expressed condolences to my weepy eyes and said, “You are in for a good night! Is this your first time seeing…” and I said, “I’d only come out for Justin Vivian Bond—I see all of Mx. Viv’s shows.” I ordered my two-drink minimum, tonight a bourbon cocktail and a club soda, and on return, Izzy brought me also a glass of prosecco, “on me.” And I got weepy again; Izzy checked on me during the evening, and I was so grateful for that kindness. (And of course my tip paid for the drink.)

Sipping and sitting at a Joe’s Pub couch table with four other people, strangers to me, all so nice, a lesbian couple, a gay man and his trans woman friend, I felt as contented as I had in ages. The band came out, Viv entered through the house, singing joy as if to say, fuck the fucking fuckers. There really is nothing like music; the longer I live the surer I am that aside from the glories of the natural world, the only other thing that really matters is making and listening and dancing to music. I believe that it’s the only human-made creation that will live on; the only true human meaning there is to make in this life comes in musical form.

Justin Vivian Bond and band with their final installment of The Well of Loneliness (Tribute to Lesbian Songwriters) Series, “Well, Well, Well.” Joe’s Pub, NYC, June 26, 2025

Music is our one human universal. My youngest nephew, James, is four, and as we O’ siblings spent the week attending to our dying mother, Mike related how James won’t let him play recorded songs when they are outside, explaining, “I want to listen to bird music.” I used to hold infant James up to the O’ kitchen window to watch the birds at the feeder, and still one of his favorite things to do at Grandma and Grandpa’s house is to help Grandpa feed the birds, scooping seed into the feeders and watching his grandpa hang the feeders back up so the birds will return. The week my mom, James’s beloved grandma, died, the backyard was filled with young cardinals, the cardinal being the spiritual bird, the sign of a loved one who has died. It was comforting. Sitting outside the Monday after Lynne died, her grandson Cullen visiting us, a female cardinal kept joining the circle. Hi, Mom.

The last video I showed my mom before she began the long fade out under hospice care was one of James saying, “Hi, Grandma! I love you! It’s James!” Lying in bed next to my mom, I held the phone up so she could watch, and she put out her hand to interact with it, touching James with her finger and saying, “You’re so cute, you little squirt,” and smiling. I told Mike about it. When I asked Mike what he was going to tell James about his grandma’s death, he told me this: The week after Lynne died, Mike said to James, “You little squirt,” and James said, “That’s what Grandma called me before she went to live with the angels,” so that’s how Mike had told him, “but,” James added, “we’ll always be connected.” Mike and his wife had read a book to James that explained we are always connected to those we love by an invisible string, and the little squirt took it to heart.

James’s response to the death of his grandma reminds me that words, stories, books, that writing itself really matters if one is to live fully as a human being. That listening and talking and reading and writing will always matter as long as there are sentient humans to take it in. Bird music and human music are music, and we need them both at different times. It’s the human made, the human felt, the human heard and seen that lifts us. The making, the doing, the experiencing. Death, after all, is not artificial.

Miss O’ is trying to figure out how to return to words, and which blog gets which arrangement of them and to what end in this crazy end of times. In the meantime, I sleep all I can and try to replenish, or something, grateful for all the long conversations I’ve had on the phone lately (especially with my friend Cindy, who needs to write her life story, or I will), and the joy of a well-tended playlist.

Sending love and the music you need,

Miss O’

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’