Tag: Art

Gratitude

(Even when you keep missing a beat)

How have you been? How was Thanksgiving? Mine was really nice, thanks, celebrating with friends (my age) who also lost their mom, two days before last Christmas. In honor of my mom, I made a version of Lynne’s homemade stuffing, and my dad and Jeff tried to make a version, too. Foods are touchstones. I hope you were able to make and enjoy some delicious touchstones, too, in the midst of feelings.

This year has been hard, hard, hard on far too many people on this earth and much of the world suffering is the hands of three white male power mongering thugs in their 70s (Trump, Putin, Netanyahu), and their minions, and I have this problem where I feel guilty even thinking about personal joy or grief amidst all the suffering. (As you know, I live alone for a reason.) And I’m struggling with myself, as we do. It’s funny to keep doing this at 61, but here we are.

To calm myself and try to recover a sense of why I’m alive, on the Monday for part of my time before reflection week over Thanksgiving (see what we might call “The White Blog”), I spent a day bookstore haunting, walking from W. 10th Street in Greenwich Village over to E. 2nd Street and Avenue B in the East Village (Alphabet City). At my first stop, the Three Lives & Company Booksellers, a lovely small corner door shop, I found and bought Patti Smith’s latest memoir, as well as another copy of Truman Capote’s Christmas classic in case, as the store manager agreed, “In case you need a gift in the hopper.”

Book store people get you. The same woman who rang me up helped a man whose female partner brought him in to help him take up reading as a hobby. (I had to sit with that, like reading was a rarefied activity.) He liked war and history; I wanted to recommend the Capote, but I didn’t interfere. I recently read that in the United States, only around 14% of adults read for pleasure. That really hurts me. Even my dad, Bernie, who didn’t graduate from high school, read the newspaper every day. I told you this: My mom, Lynne, bought him Travels with Charlie, and he liked it, but The Godfather was the book that hooked him. And this lack of American reading reminded me of something back nearly thirty years ago, in summer, a cousin and his wife and four kids were visiting, staying in the upstairs rooms in my parents’ small house—this was back when I was still teaching in Virginia, and my brother Pat lived there too. My brother Jeff lived in an apartment then and took the day off, and we all gathered to take my relatives into D.C. for the day. While we waited for them to come downstairs, my mom sat in her chair, my dad in his, Pat on the loveseat, Jeff in the corner chair, I in a side chair, each of us with a section or pages of The Washington Post (back when it was a real newspaper). We read. My cousin came downstairs into the little living room and stood still. Gradually, we looked up, “Oh, hey, John,” and he stood staring. I asked, “What’s wrong?” And he said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” What? “A family reading.” Though this was a weekday, we knew such times generally and all of my growing up as “Sunday.” (At Christmastime, we all listened together, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” That would’ve made his head explode.)

Patti’s memoir (I’m up to page 113, savoring it each night so as not to have it end) is essentially a beautiful love letter filled with gratitude to everyone who helped her become. And Patti (I feel I can call her that) has made videos on Substack, posted also on Instagram, and she talks about living in gratitude. I feel every word. In her latest (hyperlinked above) she talks about finishing her tour for the 50th Anniversary of Horses, which I told you I was lucky enough to see at the Beacon here in New York.

One of the first people to help Patti Smith find her voice in the early years after she came to New York at age 19 was the budding playwright and musician Sam Shepard. I remember reading Shepard’s plays in college, after he’d won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Buried Child. I realize now that he’d only been a real voice in the theater for ten years when I first read him—that’s wild to me. He seemed so old and established. But then, when I saw Patti Smith’s cover for the album Horses, I couldn’t have known she was only 28 to my 11. She was worlds away.

In truth, I didn’t discover or really attend to Patti Smith at all until reading her memoir Just Kids. I’d heard “Gloria,” and “Because the Night,” and of course I knew who she was, had seen Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos of her, but she scared me. Sam Shepard scared me too—I designed costumes for of his two one-acts, Cowboys #2 and Red Cross, when I was in college, ca. 1984, and his writing was out there. (I was part of an acting ensemble for Savage/Love, a play he wrote with Joseph Chaikin, but we never got to perform it.) Smith’s memoir/fantasia The Year of the Monkey in part chronicles her time nursing Shepard as he was dying of ALS, spending days typing up his final book as he dictated it from a wheelchair. (I told you about his observation, “Patti Lee, we are a Beckett play.”)

Sam Shepard’s advice that has served her a lifetime. We could all take a memo.

When I read of Patti’s childhood, I feel embraced by love, recalling my own best parts of childhood. She writes like no one I’ve read—she’s as idiosyncratic on the page as on vinyl, and it’s just wonderful.

One of Smith’s childhood memories is of reading Oscar Wilde’s “fairy tale,” “The Selfish Giant.” When I became obsessed with Oscar Wilde at age 15, my mom gave me a collection of his stories for children, so I reread this particular tale the other night. I remember that I was turned off by the religious turn the tale took; but Smith spent part of her youth as a Jehovah’s Witness and took religion seriously, until she couldn’t anymore. By contrast, I grew up free from religion as a part of my life but still had questions about God. (Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret was a favorite book.) But I knew the feeling of that first book, that first story, the one that sparked the love of reading, the need to read more.

Patti Smith’s favorite story, “The Selfish Giant,” and mine, The Little House.. What’s yours?

I know, I feel, I see how important reading is—for so many reasons beyond the stuff you learn. I was thinking about my cousin’s surprise at seeing a family reading together; now I imagine it’s families scrolling on phones, and while that is not dissimilar, the act is different. Scrolling is not meditation, somehow, but something that distances people. (There’s data on this.) There’s a calmness that comes when engaging quietly with print text. Something in the tactile element and the way our brains have spent centuries adjusting to the act of reading, and even better, surrounded by some books that everyone can see on display—it’s a shared experience even when it’s solitary. It’s not about algorithms, is what I mean.

And Patti Smith is so different from me, reading her memoir reminds me that sharing the particulars of our lives can lead to universals, in that we see ourselves as human. But I can love that Patti and I share a love of something Wildean, even if mine is his whole creative life. And like me, Smith has touchstone artists—hers Diego Rivera and Arthur Rimbaud; mine Katharine Hepburn and Virginia Woolf. Their art gave us our own humanity, opened the gate, turned on a light, pick a metaphor.

It’s such a lousy time to be human right now—“lousy” is hardly the word—and yet I know I need to walk around grateful. By some miracle on Friday, for example, I found my way through to finishing a major project at work, could see my way to the end, I mean, and was so relieved, that as I took my afternoon walk I fairly floated. It’s such a human thing. Even Patti Smith makes the finishing of her tour—a 50th anniversary tour as a superstar—sound so human, and then she had a tooth seen to at the dentist, talked about moderating a talk back after the opening of the new Frankenstein and talking to Guillermo Del Toro like he’s a person, because he is, an artist like her, but a person. Creatives living their creative lives pausing at moments to scream, “Fuck Trump.” Like the rest of us.

We’re all doing our best, getting on with the work of our worlds. Loving our friends, our families, telling them that. Expressing gratitude for a good chair, a coat that keeps us warm, a hat that stays on in the wind. An orange. A book.

I’ll ruminate on all the horrors of our country again soon—I think I’m waiting for an idea of what we need to do, besides not quit. Remember was Sam said to Patti, “If you miss a beat, invent another.”

Sending love,

Miss O’

East 3rd Street, NYC, should you like to visit there.

Offloading our hearts and minds, tempest-tossed, and the salve of art

O, I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer.
(Miranda, The Tempest, Act I Scene 2)

I read this week that the tech bruhs, so called in current parlance, see the world as being divided into two classes of people: the thinkers and the scrollers. While they, the Thinking Class, devote themselves to higher learning, philosophy, and deep work, affording the same wealth of life experience and cashflow to their offspring, they themselves are engineering the planet so that the rest of us, by which I gather they mean the 99% and our offspring, are relegated to the Scrolling Class, those who work as drones and merely consume whatever they, the Thinkers, put out for profit.

It’s all very Brave New World, a novel I read in high school and can’t shake. Will you be made into an Alpha or an Epsilon? Will you even know? And even if you are an Alpha, watch out if you forget to take your soma (“the opiate of the masses” that replaces religion) and have an original thought. All hell will break loose, and the only antidote is a rebel copy of Shakespeare.

My library was dukedom large enough.
(Prospero, The Tempest, Act 1 Scene 2)

This week the Trump Administration, illegally as usual, dismantled the U.S. Department of Education, spreading all the allocated funds around (which legally only Congress can do, but Republicans) to different departments, so K-12 education is now under the U.S. Department of Labor. Huh? In a seemingly unrelated development, the Trump Administration also demoted a bunch of educational degrees to “nonprofessional,” meaning people pursuing nursing, say, or teaching, will not be able to take out unlimited loans to attain a degree. Not only were the listed degrees for women-dominated professions, the professions listed were those whose members are legally bound to report suspected child abuse. If no one is educated to take those jobs…

Are you following? The Pedo-in-Chief is terrified of the release of the Epstein Files, and his Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, whose husband Vince McMahon was set to go on trial amid accusations of child sexual abuse until a Chicago judge paused the case last December when Linda was announced as Trump’s pick for her new position. Meanwhile, Trump’s former “spiritual advisor” was arrested for child rape and plead guilty. In a call-in show I heard a snippet of this week, a caller demanded to know what was “wrong” about child rape.

The cumulative effect of all this during a single week has made me a bit of an emotional wreck, but it was an independent journalist on Instagram who formally linked all these pieces for me. From Love Ethic Yoga:

Moving K-12 education to the Department of Labor while red states are removing child labor laws & dropping the age of consent to 12 or 14 is a calculated move. The leaders of these departments are pedo📁files or pedo apologists. This is NOT coincidence.

Uneducated children are easy prey.
Hungry children are easy prey.
Homeless children are easy prey.
Unaccompanied minors are easy prey.

These predators are baiting the water. They’re creating the proverbial “fish in a barrel”. Yes, privatization is part of this but we cannot forget how many pedos are in this current admin. We cannot let them get away with this.

I got ill—I mean, Trump and his people are transparently, openly constructing a world where child sexual abuse is normalized, institutionalized, and unstoppable. These “men” want all young women and girls (40% of whom between the ages of 15-44 want to leave the United States, I saw in a recent poll) under their complete control in order to force-breed children, for either labor on behalf of or the sexual pleasure of (white Christian) men. Once the children “age out,” a term I learned on Law and Order: SVU, they will be, one presumes, forced to push through their trauma with slave labor, living in one of the concentration camps being constructed all over the United States.

Utah’s planned mega-shelter should be like a jail for homeless people, one widely embraced group says

This is the Brave New United States of America, friends.

It’s more than hard to take—it’s impossible. This insanity has to stop. We need to see handcuffs and prison bars on the right people, and soon. We know this.

I can’t take in everything—you can’t either. So while I know there’s Israel’s defiance of the ceasefire, and Russia’s wish-list labeled a “peace agreement” by Trump and Rubio (rejected, thank goodness) by Zelensky; protests in Charlotte and Raleigh over ICE raids; so much, so much, my god, it was the children and their protectors I focused on, “offloading” the rest, more or less.

This week on a work Zoom call, a colleague mentioned that there is always work or training or something that we simply have to “offload.” It’s not a term I knew—but I got it. You just pass that conceptual understanding to someone, maybe a spouse who gets plumbing or a coworker who is good at Excel, and you don’t worry about trying to learn that thing, much less master it. You only have the capacity for so much, and recognizing that is not a bad thing. (That said, we all have to trust in our capacity to learn new things, and try to do that, even though in my early 60s I’m finding that I have to immerse myself with the focus of a monk to his devotions to do something as complex and unintuitive as Jira (if you don’t know, don’t ask), say, but it’s reassuring to know that I can still do it, if more painstakingly.)

Speaking of offloading: I no longer have a creative life in the recognizable sense. I’m sorry about it, but between taking care of family, holding grief, learning new things on the job, and this fucking administration’s atrocities, I had to let something go, and that was it—and it’s no great loss to the world, obviously. That out of the way, I’d like to celebrate the achievements of women artists whom I know as friends. In a world, and more specifically a nation, that doesn’t value women, children, innocence, creativity, or truth, here’s some art you need.

  • Read Amanda Quaid’s debut poetry collection No Obvious Distress, which explores her (still) young life with Stage IV metastatic mesenchymal chondrosarcoma (learning the pronunciation of which seems to be more trouble from some people than her years of treatment, so say the name) in all the ways;
  • Read Anna Citrino’s fourth collection, Stories We Didn’t Tell, which explores the unspeakable hardships and abuses of her American prairie women ancestors, based on the poet’s decades of research, in rich language;
  • Watch Patricia E. Gillespie’s documentary, The Secrets We Bury, which I saw at IFC here in New York in its premiere screening this week, about a true crime, told with love and empathy and not sensationalism;
  • Listen to Patti Smith’s Horses (1975). (Envy me my Row X seat at The Beacon Theater on Broadway Friday night in New York City to see Patti Smith and her Band play the shit out of Horses in its 50th Anniversary Year, plus encores of classics. Patti also spat, twice, and it was glorious.)

So lest you think Miss O’ has given up on art, I haven’t, and I hope you haven’t either. There is nothing on this earth as satisfying as a creative act, something you can point to and say, “I made that.” There was nothing, and now there’s something, and I did it. And the world is more colorful and right and full than it was before you created that thing, however small, even making a smile happen on a stranger’s face in a notebook store, which I did on Friday night before the concert. I did that. That thing, there? You did that. Not AI, not engineered by some tech bruh, or ordered on you by some basement-dwelling podcaster or a bottom feeder in Washington. You. Just you.

Let’s stop scrolling together and get seriously radical in creative community. Take a moment to read. To be quiet. And then connect.

Here’s Mr. Rogers on the value silence from Charlie Rose, which is a clip I hope you watch. “My, it’s a noisy world,” he says, and it is. There’s more he goes on to say from his 1994 book, You Are Special, including about his professor, Dr. William Orr, who told him, “You know Fred, there is one thing that evil cannot stand, and that is forgiveness.” Take a minute with that. As a reader, Rogers says that the white spaces between the paragraphs are more important than the text, by which he means that if you aren’t using silence to reflect on what you are reading, you are missing the point of the endeavor. You can see more clips of Fred Rogers here. “A great gift an adult can give to a child is to let the child see what you love in front of them.” Whether it’s car repair, lawn maintenance, playing cello, fixing things, reading, singing, cooking, telling stories, dancing, whatever it is (note: what you love, not what you exploit)—that is the gift. I think I try to do that in life—to show love of life in greeting others. It’s tiny—I’m not a worldwide creative power like Patti Smith—but really it’s about being present, as Rogers says, moment to moment (and it’s the most important work in rehearsing a show, as shown me by director Maureen Shea). Doing things even a little larger than ourselves, then, in presence, is the point. Mr. Rogers only cared to be recognized if it made a child feel special—Fred Rogers liked “not the fancy people,” but regular people, and he aspired to “be the best receiver I can ever be—graceful receiving of what someone gives us; we’ve given that person a wonderful gift.”

Miss O’ most gracefully received.

The play I’ve been quoting here interstitially, The Tempest, is my favorite Shakespeare play; in some ways it’s like a compilation reel of all his best ideas, and his final play and only original plot, his retirement play. I’ve seen four productions of it—at the Globe in London, with Vanessa Redgrave as Prospero (it was awful); at the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, D.C., directed by Garland Wright, which still ranks as the top theater experience of my life (even after seeing Hamilton and Gypsy with Patti LuPone); one at Classic Stage Company downtown, with Mandy Patinkin (okay); and the fourth at St. Ann’s Warehouse, an all-women cast set in a women’s prison, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, with Harriet Walter as Prospero (fantastic). The most famous speech of the play, by Prospero, comes in Act IV, and I always think of it when eras end, as well as even a simple good thing, and especially a life:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on: and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
(Prospero, The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1)

In the final act of the play, Prospero’s daughter newly in love sees all the possibility of life, and this is from where Aldous Huxley took his dystopian novel’s title:

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t.
(Miranda, The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1)

Sure, love is wildly naive, but it’s the beginning of everything. There’s a new world to be made. Let’s stop the fucking fuckers and do that.

Sending love, philosophy, music, poetry, creativity, all the good church,

Miss O’

The People Have the Power: Patti Smith and her band, The Beacon Theater, NYC, 11/21/25, the 50th Anniversary of Horses. Photo by LO”H. This was church.

How to Say Grace

“You pollute the air.”

~ the blind Hamm after blowing his whistle, greeting the entrance of his servant, Clov, Endgame by Samuel Beckett

The characters in Beckett’s Endgame, which I saw Saturday at Irish Arts Center here in New York, presented by Druid, a theater company based in Ireland, are in an apocalyptic waiting game in some kind of shelter, starving, without painkillers, waiting for death. Hamm’s blindness and lameness keep him confined to a lounge chair, while his parents, Nagg and Nell, are confined to separate rusty garbage cans, waiting for death like their son.

It’s a funny play, and compelling, and of course, sadly, perfectly appropriate for the American moment. I look at Trump of the shit-filled diapers, bloated and slurring, demented and wobbly, barking orders to tear down the East Wing and kill fisherman at sea and send $40 billion of our taxpayer dollars to bail out Argentina even as he bars the release of any of the $6 billion in reserve for SNAP in case of government shutdown and oversees the tripling of our health insurance premiums, causing millions to lose coverage. His spending so much waste, the Republicans so much garbage.

“You pollute the air,” says Trump of our nation’s workers and immigrants and women, as he orders the dumping of toxic East Wing waste onto a public park golf course outside D.C., to prevent regular people from golfing, and distracts from the Epstein files, so shocked was he that his best friend of 15 years, Jeffrey Epstein, kept files on his best friend Donald J. Trump.

SNAP benefits are set to expire November 1, and without a deal from the Republicans, all working Americans will struggle to afford not only food but also any health insurance at all. To provide help for this coming starvation and health apocalypse, your Miss O’ wants to encourage you to donate to your local food pantries, if you can, whatever you can afford. Here in New York City, where I can only hope Mamdani wins the mayoral race, I gave a bunch more bucks to the following organizations. You can check your local areas for similar opportunities, if you want. The worst thing you can do is nothing.

  • City Harvest
  • City Meals on Wheels
  • Bowery Mission
  • God’s Love We Deliver
  • Sunnyside Community Center

While visiting my dad in Virginia a couple of weeks ago for the first time since my mom, Lynne, died, I gathered up all her clothes, shoes, and accessories in the closets and drawers, and Bernie (who was so sad looking at them) and I donated them. We do what we can, whatever our griefs.

I haven’t published on WordPress for some time—I haven’t been of a mind to play the role of teacher, each day being the next level of crazy in America. I’m sickened and lost most of the time. It’s hard to imagine Thanksgiving and Christmas, let alone my favorite, Halloween, what with ICE agents throwing teargas at children in a Halloween parade in Chicago. How is any of this happening? It appears that the Washington Post is this close to shuttering its print division, hastened along by owner Bezos, the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness” turning out to be a promise. After 60+ years as a subscriber, my dad sees his morning paper razor thin, formerly robust Metro, Sports, and Style sections combined into one slender one, few ads; his delivery lady has gone from dozens of deliveries, to ten, to two in our entire neighborhood since Bezos took over the paper. This seems to be intentional: Bezos’s lost 75,000 digital subscribers, too. It’s just a matter of time now, the owner ready to light his big cigar with the last of the masthead as he boards his newest yacht.

The billionaires are the 1% that are bringing our country, our world, down. Full stop. Blackout the system, give to your food banks, save all your pennies, tighten the belts, hunker down. It’s gonna be a long, hard winter.

But you know what? We can do this. Bernie and Lynne were born into the Great Depression. We always cut our toothpaste tubes in half to scrape the last of the paste onto brushes, had leftover night on Fridays, lived on peanut butter and jelly when we had to. You can do it too. And you can have laughs and play cards and read books rather than use power on devices. And say grace. The real kind.

Love your neighbors through this crazy Republican endgame.

And vote while you still can.

“Grouchy Resilience”

A week off with art and the city, with photos

It takes a while to come down from the ledge, to decompress, when taking a vacation. All I had to decompress from, in my immediate life, was dealing with some personal grief, healing a hand from surgery, and unfeeling a job with lots of confusions in the odds and ends of finishing a project. It’s an embarrassment of riches, my little life. Somehow I feel I should do a roll call of global suffering to rationalize my own breaks in this life, but I’ll spare you that guilt.

Monday, Labor Day, I hung out in the neighborhood. Walked about. Hey, the mural’s back.

Tuesday, I headed to Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum via the N Train to 5th Avenue/59th Street. Here, I am going to complain. One cannot walk two yards, from the Plaza Hotel, to the lake; from the Sheep’s Meadow to the Literary Walk and Bethesda Fountain, without 1) choppers overhead; 2) food carts of overpriced water; 3) vendors of every imaginable item of tourist shit blocking the view of the American elms; and 4) bad saxophones/pan pipes. Assaults to the senses all, so all you can do is look up.

While at the Met, I visited a couple of favorite pieces. First, the El Anatsui:

Then Paxton’s tea girls:

Grateful but still feeling edgy, on Wednesday I thought maybe I what I needed was water; the Rockaways were a couple hours away, but hey, the East River is down the road:

Close. But not feeling shiny yet.

Thursday, I rested.

Friday, I joined my friend Cathy to meet a former colleague in the city for lunch, and it was reviving. As I was only a block from MoMA, after lunch I parted from my friends and headed in.

Bingo.

The cap on the beat:

Perfect. Breezy, calm, cool.

When you can’t have it all, settle for grouchy resilience. And quiet marble.

Sending love, renewed, from New York City,

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’

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’

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’

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’