Last night I dreamed I came out of the room where I sleep when I’m at my parents’ house, but it was my bed here in Queens, and my very aged, dead mother sat before a bright computer screen at the living room desk in the dark, her alert face blue-lit and her thin hands wildly flying over the keyboard, flying up and over the keys, eyes focused but expressionless. She was wearing a version of her blue pajamas. “Mom?” I needed to tell her she was dead, she didn’t need to do this, and I pulled myself awake. It was disturbing, seeing that tiny body, so pale and shriveled, working on a computer, which she never did, and so frantically.
I have dreams like that quite a bit since my mom died, unnerving dreams at times. And it’s easy to feel confused then, and afraid.
This evening on YouTube I caught NPR legend Terri Gross on Colbert talking about her husband’s death and a dream she had about him, in which she turned to him to remind him he was dead, and he vanished. Stephen then told Terri about a dream he had after his mom died, where he told her a similar thing, “Mom, why are you here?” and that she was dead; she also vanished. Stephen’s mother’s dream words before she vanished were, “Oh good. It’s the only way you’ll stay awake.” Terri asked what he thought that meant, and she suggested that his mother’s words meant what her husband’s presence meant in her own dream: you need to live life. By that I gather, when you admit the death, when you face that loss, you can awaken to your own life again. It was a wonderfully tender, adult conversation between two artists, two humans, one I hope everyone, somehow, can see during this horrible week. I needed it.
During their exchange, I found myself teary, and the dream I had last night came back to me. What was my mom telling me? I think my mother was telling me to write my life. Lynne had no interest in my acting, my teaching, or my writing. “That’s your thing,” she’d say. But here she was in death telling me, maybe, or showing me, that I need to keep writing, and even writing about her. Maybe it’s a better dream than first appeared, maybe. Nothing to be afraid of, and in fact quite the opposite.
As I do when it’s on demand on TCM, I watched Now, Voyager with Bette Davis and Paul Henreid for the many, manyeth time, and the feelings I have about it change over viewings and years, but whatever qualms or critiques, I can’t help loving Charlotte’s journey as Camille. Unconventionally, Charlotte Vale finds a purpose for her life, waking out of years of emotional abuse to become her own woman. Her most important moment of self-discovery comes during a renewed fight with her mother, when Charlotte is able to say honestly, “You see, Mother, I’m not afraid.” In addition to Max Steiner’s score, her guide out of the sanitarium and into the world was that Whitman quotation, presented to her by Dr. Jaquith. She can sail forth to seek and find; she can do anything she wants now. She can become. “I’m not afraid.”
When I saw the new footage today of Renee Good in her car via the “body cam” or phone of Jonathan Ross, the ICE “agent” who shot Ms. Good in cold blood in the face at least three times through her windshield as she left the scene, something became plain to me: that Renee Good, who by all accounts, including her wife’s, was nothing if not kind, “pure sunshine”—that the only thing Good did wrong was be true to her name and her Christian faith.
She was not afraid.
She said kindly to the officer, “It’s okay, I’m not mad at you.” And Ross opened fire. “Fuckin’ bitch!” he screamed.
I saw an interview with a pastor who was arrested by ICE and was asked over and over again, “Are you afraid?” “Are you afraid now?” And that (true) follower of Jesus said simply, “I’m not afraid,” and you could tell it was driving the ICE thugs to murderous rage. To what end? What do they think this rage at good people gives them?
I look at all the people posting, all the people protesting, all the people still out in their neighborhoods. We aren’t afraid. We are grieving, we are traumatized, we are experiencing all this horror together, we’ve all known loss, been visited by death in dreams, and we aren’t afraid. You know why? Because, whatever our faith or origin, we know who we are. And we are learning more all the time. We seek, we find, and it’s interesting to note that the Bible quotation as we know it doesn’t stop there. Let me close out with a little Gnostic Gospel of Thomas who said, “Seek and you shall find. When you find, you will become troubled. When you are troubled, you will be astonished, and rule over all things.” I’m not a Christian; I study all the faiths, and that feels universal to me.
I hope you have the dreams you need tonight.
Sending love,
Miss O’
P.S. A few words from Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense was published in January of 1776. This later reminder from Paine, when the rebellion seemed its most hopeless, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” via Heather Cox Richardson:
This would have been 36, 37 years ago now, in the fall, the first year I moved out to Highway 644 in Appomattox, Virginia, the little yellow house—I told you this story—and my heat source was now a wood stove. My teaching colleague and neighbor Jeanne drove me and her trusty German shepherd Ton-Ton, struggling in her final year with hip dysplasia, in her truck just barely into the woods by Nixola Guill’s house, back just behind the old clapboard church that the historical society would later that year move to a “historic village.” It was just getting on dusk, and our plans had gotten waylaid by one thing and another, but the fact was Jeanne’s family was out of light wood, and I was going to need it too, if I wanted to get a fire going properly. This is the stuff sold as “Georgia flatwood” in cabiney catalogues, but what it is is old pine stumps, the pitch of which has turned into pure kerosene. Talk about a fire starter.
I don’t know who owned the land (and no doubt we were trespassing), but the forest was deciduous, changing over from pine to hardwood. As a result, the pine trees lost light, began dying, and the place had become loaded with pine stumps. Jeanne had noticed the abundance of them in one of her walks; it was getting on the time of year she had to put the dogs in blaze orange vests and wear one herself, early hunters out illegally, too, so our trespass was nothing, what with perfectly good lightwood just going to waste.
Jeanne pointed out the wide gully leading from deep in the woods to behind the church. “That was a road at one time,” she explained; walking in the woods with a biologist and native Virginian was always instructive. In fact, my four years living in that county could not have been a smaller life or a bigger education. I’ve written about it in places, but this is about wandering through woods at dusk. We’d walk, locate a stump, take a shovel, and dig; so old was the wood that it only took a little digging and some tugging to pull the stumps up. “Smell that,” Jeanne said. Oh, yes, there’s that kerosene smell. Jeanne’d brought along a couple of large burlap sacks to fill and that we did, dragging the sacks back to the truck, as Truman Capote might say, lugging the stumps like a kill.
By the time the dragging began, it was fully dark. You don’t think you can see in the dark, but you can. Because of the gully on our right, we knew which direction to walk in, and we also kept well to the left of the gully so we didn’t tumble in. It was cold now; supper sounded good. Do you know that feeling? And the tingle of wood smoke filled the air all around, all the stoves of the wide-apart neighbors commencing their roars. Lifting those sacks into the back of the truck, and Ton-Ton too, getting inside the cab, pulling out onto the road for the short drive to Jeanne’s driveway, I can’t tell you how alive I felt. Her husband would chop up a stump for me that evening to take back to my own stove down the road, where I’d go right after supper.
I get teary thinking about this, the exhilaration of that evening, one that felt like many hours but couldn’t have been more than one. A friend, woods, a dog, a truck, a purpose, and that dusky light, the promise of supper when the work is done. It’s all you need.
Back in my young teaching days in the late 1900s, people enjoyed their experiences without the press of photographic documentation. I miss those days.
And walking around Queens this evening, that’s exactly where my sense memory went. And I thought I’d take you on a memory walk with me, in case you needed a reminder that there is not only a way into the woods, but also a way out, even in the dark, and if you pay attention and stay present, you’ll find it.
When I take my evening walk about in my Queens neighborhood, and maybe I’ve written about this before—this is the age, but I sort of marvel that I’m of it.
I can’t help marveling that for a truly odd woman, odd since birth, who never really belonged anywhere or with any group for as long as I can remember (and lucky enough to find loads of friends just like me), I have still managed to make a life in a range of locations, learning through walking, greeting everyone I make eye contact with, with “Hi.” I’m not stupid, but my experience has been that as Anne Frank said in her diary, most people really are basically good.
It’s hard to feel like that today.
Trigger happy white men are freely enjoying acting our all their Nazi fantasies, their blood lust, on ordinary sweet Americans, and they know they can do it with impunity. It won’t matter if anyone is charged for the murder of the Minnesota poet/wife/mom whose van was in an ICE agent’s way, because Trump will pardon him. This is America now. Until these men rape, kill, pillage, torture, torment, destroy everything human and decent to the point of over-satiation, they won’t rest. And they won’t stop, not really, ever, because their rage is superfueled by their increasing cruelty.
I remember seeing footage of the earliest days of the war Russia has waged on Ukraine, where confused and under-equipped Russian baby soldiers pointed weapons at and were utterly baffled by old people walking out of their houses to shoo them away, like flies, and they went. That didn’t last long. Three years later, the war is no closer to ending.
America will soon be under siege, too, I guess, by its own kill-happy MAGA citizens. It’s so hard to fathom how quickly it all went to hell. And how long we will have to endure this is anyone’s guess. General Stephen Miller all but came all over himself on CNN the other night as he talked about raw power, how he had it now, and would never give up that “raw iron” he was, in his dreams, holding in his pants.
Even harder to reckon with is the fact that we have absolutely no Democratic leadership to meet this nation’s defining moment. Not even a retired military official will break protocol. Trump has zero real opposition outside ordinary citizens doing their best to keep democracy going. It’s lonely and it’s terrifying. And now, deadly.
So here I was this evening, after a half hour of wracking sobs, making myself dress well and go out into the world in search of dinner to bring home, marveling at the sky.
And I began remembering other skies, the seasonal skies of many walks, from early adolescence on, when you start going outside yourself—the wild Virginia sky of my childhood neighborhood after a hail storm; a playground sky of Biblical proportions, the light coming down from behind the clouds, as I played basketball with middle school friends; windswept blue drama during Hurricane Andrew in the eye of that storm in rural Central Virginia; half blue, half black clouds with rain to dodge walking across the Virginia Tech campus; an otherworldly dark orange sunset in Vermont during summer in graduate school; the still-light sky of London at 11 PM in summer; the perfect dusk of summer parks in Oxford; so many skies.
In all my walking in places as disparate as Woodbridge, Blacksburg, Appomattox, Vermont, Oxford, Spriggs Road, California, Iowa, London, and New York City, alone as I always am, I’m of it. Always of it. The sky never lets me feel abandoned. And so it is that I seem always to be from places, eventually, regardless of my oddness.
I’m too deeply, darkly sad to write anything else tonight.
As if on cue, my friend Tom sent me this:
Yes, they are.
I’m sending you these:
Once at the beach around midnight in Nags Head, North Carolina, a few decades back, I heard a mother, probably the same age as the Minnesota ICE murder victim, say to her eager child on just arriving, “Let’s not gather shells at nighttime. Look at the moon.” And what a moon it was.
Look at the sky. Don’t let the fucking fuckers take away your sky.
This New Year’s evening at 12:01 AM, newly elected New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani will be sworn into office by New York Attorney General Letitia James. I cannot recall the world watching a New York City mayoral election before, but then, America has not been engaged in a civil war since 1865, this time with a transparently corrupt U.S. president trying to break up the union, smashing it into pieces using a Bible as a cudgel.
Mayor-elect Mamdani will swear in on a holy Quran, and our treasured Under the Desk News correspondent V Spehar explains what you can say to your MAGA community as they freak out:
Following her list of all the various volumes politicians have chosen to swear in on, V asks us what we would swear in on, and there is no question that I would swear in on my boxed edition of Truman Capote’s personal story “A Christmas Memory.” I can’t imagine a more American story, centering on a young queer white boy in Alabama, abandoned by his divorced mother and being raised by evangelical relatives. The one true protection he has is his cousin, a much older woman, a bit balmy and childlike, who truly loves and cares for young Truman, known to her as Buddy.
The memory set around Christmas, from the baking of fruitcakes to the finding of a tree, couldn’t be more Hallmark on its surface, but far less shiny and much more emotionally complicated, particularly the details of abject poverty that most Americans would fail to understand today. Back then, and this was my parents’ time, being poor was nothing to be ashamed of (though what would be familiar is the forces of corporations doing everything possible to keep Americans as down as was possible and still get them into the factories and mines to work, but this isn’t part of the story).
Below is a selection after the baking has commenced (with whiskey for the soaking obtained earlier in the story from Mr. Haha Jones, a Native American riverside cafe owner who sells moonshine illegally (this being Prohibition), Capote casually revealing more complexities and hypocrisies of life in the United States).
Strangers “seem to us our truest friends.” That, to me, is a kind of American ideal, born out of the hatred too many of us experience from those closest to us. Connections to distant places, gratitude to presidents and knife grinders and passers-through equally, Indian or Black or white—all the people of their lives, accepted and shown appreciation, despite the despotic rule of the Christian relatives they try to forget. And their little dog, Queenie, is unforgettable, too.
It’s a beautiful, human story, focused on love between friends. Every year for many Decembers, my friend Barry Hoff would stage “A Lovely Little Reading” of this story, complete with fruitcake he baked himself, for a gathering of friends on the third floor of the now closed Hourglass Tavern on W. 46th Street, shuttered by extortionist rent, something we are counting on Mayor Mamdani to address for the good of all of us.
I always took for granted the tradition of swearing on a book, a bible, though I never realized I could choose what book I wanted (I hope you watch V’s video). Were you to take office, what book would you swear on?
“The only photo we ever had taken”: Truman Capote was friends with Nell Harper Lee, a neighbor, who used him as model for Dill in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird, and helped Truman do his research for his classic true crime story In Cold Blood.
Sending out love and high hopes this New Year’s Eve, as I fittingly watch a Marx Brothers Marathon on TCM, the absurdity of which satire is all too contemporary,
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.
On November 9, 2010, 1st Lt. Robert M. Kelly, USMC, was killed in Afghanistan. Robert had been a student of mine at Gar-Field High School in Woodbridge, Virginia, along with his older brother, John, both of them the sons of Gen. John Kelly (Maj. Kelly, when I first knew him; I attended the ceremony when he became Col. Kelly). Both John and Robert were in the Drama Club, and very different kids, John doing technical theater (lighting), Robert hanging around until he scored a legendary turn as Juliet in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged (with a cast not of three but of thousands) his senior year, a performance that caused his father to laugh harder than I’d ever seen him do. Interestingly, son John (now a colonel in the USMC himself) was naturally funnier, but ironically it was Robert’s relative seriousness and deeply felt empathy that made him a great comic actor.
I got the news of Robert’s death 15 years ago through missed connections all day, brother John trying to reach me, my return calls back going to voicemail; I thought something might have happened to Alan, another former student and John’s best friend; finally I got hold of Alan while at a play lab at the Pythian on the Upper West Side, where cell reception as terrible and I had to go out to the street to reckon with the truth. I didn’t know Robert had even been deployed; apparently it was a sudden decision to send his unit over, and maybe only a week had passed since his arrival, an IED doing the job.
Robert’s funeral and burial at Arlington, just eleven years after his graduation, seven years after I’d left teaching and had moved to New York, was attended by well over a hundred people, many from Gar-Field, teachers, students, friends, parents, along with his family. Hard to process even now. I was reminded of all this yesterday when my friend and retired department chair Tom texted to remind me, thinking only ten years had gone by. (I knew it was longer because my cell phone had been a flip phone. Isn’t that a particularly millennial reason to remember a date?)
So tragedy is on the brain this morning.
Biblical sky drama over Queens.
Last Saturday I went to see a West End-Broadway transfer production of Oedipus, a new adaptation and direction by Robert Icke (say Ike), with friends Frances and Jim, who got the tickets for us (or else I might have foolishly missed it). The lesson of Oedipus is, famously, “One always meets one’s fate in the path one takes to try to avoid it.” In the Greek version, the Oracle at Delphi prophesizes that the baby born to King Laius and Jocasta will one day kill his father and marry his mother; Jocasta then, to spare her son, orders her servant to kill the baby. Instead, the loving servant places the baby in the woods, where he is found by an older couple from the country who raise him as their own, no one the wiser. Until eighteen years go by…
In this update, Mark Strong plays Oedipus as a political candidate on the night of a highly consequential election (intimations of Trump v. Democracy), and all the action takes place during the two hours between polls closing and the announcement of the winner (a big clock on the stage counting down—Aristotle in Poetics says that any good drama should play out in no more nor less than two hours, and Icke takes on the challenge). In a filmed sequence as the show’s opening exposition, a confident, sexy Oedipus, standing outside what looks to be the British Parliament building, tells the press that he knows people question why he, a foreigner, should lead them, and he promises (without warning to anyone in his circle) to “release my birth certificate.” It brings up Obama, Mamdani, all the prejudices of our times, and if you know the story of Oedipus, it’s the perfect setup for an adaptation. (Icke must have shrieked and shaken with freakout when he thought of it—hoping no one else saw that obvious and genius connection up to now.)
Oedipus—handsome, smart, gifted, loving, and progressive—has one fatal flaw: hubris. He really believes he is in complete control, fully in possession of himself, knows who he is, knows who everyone is in his life. The next two hours unravel in the revelations we know from the Greek tragedy, all so believable and so timely, with Lesley Manville’s Jocasta ripping your heart out, her (updated for our more enlightened times, shades of Epstein) story of being raped by old Laius at 13, forced to give up the baby to die because he’s married; Laius later marrying her and leaving her a widow who later meets Oedipus, falls wildly in love, and marries him, giving him three children, she then in middle age. At the play’s opening, Oedipus is 52; Jocasta, we only later realize, is 65; their children are college age. In short order, despite a landslide victory, their children are about to lose everything, Jocasta her life, and the nation the promise of a brilliant leader. (The best part was sitting next to someone who didn’t know the story—lots of people don’t—and hearing the gasp.)
How does any brain process such a trauma? Frances and Jim and I staggered through the tourist minefield that is Times Square to the quiet of an Italian restaurant to process it, all of truly gutted, Aristotle’s catharsis manifest. In enduring tragedy, and in catharsis, we not only heal, we are cleansed.
A cleansing view, fall in Central Park.
This morning I watched a YouTube video sent by my friend Ryan last night of researcher and “No. 1 Brain Scientist” Jill Bolte Taylor in conversation with podcaster Steven Bartlett, talking about the “four characters” in our brain’s left and right hemispheres. As a result of a stroke at age 37 in 1996, Bolte Taylor’s Harvard-ladder academic career ended, and the next eight years were about recovering the functionality of her left hemisphere, the part of our brains that does numbers, controls language, helps us plan and think. During those eight years, she worked to use her right hemisphere to help her rebuild the cellular connections in the left, and the result was a huge new life focused on even deeper brain work while living on a boat and not in a lab, connected to nature and to the universe, using her whole brain. I highly recommend the video, which I watched at 4:30 this morning (because old), and her “four characters” of the brain put me in mind of not only all our society’s conflicts but also of all the characters necessary to have an effective drama:
1. Character One: Left side, thinking: the planner, analyzer, counter, linguist
2. Character Two: Left side, emotional: the grudge holder, trauma re-liver, pain protector
3. Character Three: Right side, emotional: the explorer, the curious one, the playful one
4. Character Four: Right side, thinking: the connector of experiences, keeper of wisdom
Just as a drama needs all these characters for conflict and resolution (my take), humans need all four in balance to be whole. I took loads of notes, and if you watch the video, you can too, but Bolte Taylor’s message of a society out of balance resonated most with me. Most of our lives seem to be spent lived only on the Left side, she says, holding grudges and reliving trauma as we strive for perfection and knock ourselves out to make money. It’s killing our brain cells, it’s killing us individually, and it’s killing the planet.
To wit: Sec. of Defense (he says “War” but it’s not official) Pete Hegseth announced this week that the United States is no longer a peace-seeking nation, but rather, our military preparation will be solely focused on wars. We know from Republican spokespeople, such as Russell Vought, JD Vance, and Elon Musk, that “empathy is weakness” (a negation of the brain’s right hemisphere) is a guiding principle for their politics. The Conservative Movement is totally, then, left-hemisphere in the brain, focused on self-interest, self-protection, generational trauma on a tape loop. It’s not sustainable, but it has to be gotten through and past, somehow.
What I think Conservatives fear most about education, about learning the truth about our history, is what the play Oedipus shows so shockingly: when you uncover the truth about yourself, you are destined for destruction. But what the audience learns is that no life is an honest life if it’s built on lies, when your armor is a birth certificate and the woman who raised you as your mother, and lied about it, thinks it’s “only paper.” And I’m struck by all these paradoxes—the fear we have of knowing the truth, and yet the impossibility of living an honest, full, happy life without it.
As your Miss O’ has long said, if your belief system cannot withstand challenges to the point that your response is to stifle and even kill to stop those challenges, you don’t have a belief system—you only have fear.
What Oedipus lacks is balance—for him, in his ignorance, life has been pretty great. He is empathetic but only intellectually. (I think this same hubris applies to a lot of America’s Liberals, if I’m honest.) Oedipus’s mistake, his hubris, was to be blindly fearless, blindly on the side of the common man (because he was raised by fine, working class parents) without knowing his own life’s truth—he was the product of rape by a lecherous pedophile of a king, and he married his own mother because of the coverup. At the end of the play, Oedipus blinds himself, and as the cult-prophet Teiresias tells him, when you learn, you will go blind; and when you are blind, you will see properly.
In a similar way, Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke—the near-total collapse of the brain of a preeminent brain scientist—made her work expand into realms she could not have imagined during her eight years of recovery.
And this all got me thinking again:
We have to release the Epstein files. Virginia Giuffre’s death cannot be in vain.
We have to embrace our nation’s original sin, slavery, teach it properly, reckon with it, so our nation can progress in smarter, healthier ways.
We must demand the resignation of Pete Hegseth, and work to be a peaceable nation, so that there are no more 1st Lt. Robert Kellys dying on foreign soil; and you’ll pardon me for not grieving Dick Cheney.
This is a heavy lot for a Sunday morning.
I’m sitting here on this November day, in my kitchen rocker, worried again about whether or not I need a new refrigerator (thermostat being weird) and a new Mac (battery not fully charging), seeing it’s after 9 AM and I really need to dress and go out and about before it rains. And these mundanities of life require our attention, our presence, to live fully, ever balanced against all those huge mega truths.
On my personal day on Friday, I found myself in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, lighting candles (one for my mom, one for my friend Richard’s mom, and a third for the ancestors), which I hope was not hypocritical from irreligious me. It was nice to sit and meditate in the midst of the most famous cathedral in the biggest city with the most consequential mayoral election perhaps ever, and be present to my mom and memory.
The next time I’m there, I’ll light a candle for Robert.
~ 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.
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.
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.
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.
The Miss O' Show (Teacher's Edition) 