Tag: writing

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’

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’

Dabble

Ramblings from around the apartment

Hello, angel. How are you today? This morning I water-colored a card for a friend and mailed it at the post office, stopped by the store for a few items, and picked up 2-for-1 day-old cheese danishes at the Romanian bakery. A chilly, soft, overcast morning, nothing to rush for. I think the saddest part of any day for me—when I’m standing in the kitchen, making coffee maybe, or in my rocker starting to write in my journal—is the moment I remember I have a phone, and I have to check it. (That said, I called by parents, Bernie and Lynne, for our weekly Saturday morning visit. Grateful to still be able to do that.)

I miss landlines and answering machines, before telemarketers and scammers, of course. I miss being unreachable. I miss quiet. That said, the other day I happened on a documentary called The Miracle of The Little Prince, about the ways in which the book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry provides a universal story that is being translated into languages that are facing extinction. The cultures where this is happening, not identified except by languages, include lives in landscapes from deep desert to heavy snows of the north, near Finland. The filmmaker focuses long on the landscapes, the quiet, an unending quiet, the monotony of caring for a few animals, searching for water, making tea. I don’t know if I could do that kind of quiet anymore.

If you haven’t read The Little Prince, I recommend it. I’ve found that there are two kinds of people (though as the late Tom Robbins said, “There are two kinds of people: people who believe in two kinds of people, and people who don’t”): Little Prince people and Winnie-the-Pooh people. I think pretty much everyone relates to Charlie Brown, but those other two philosophical guys are extremes. I know people who love neither, but there’s usually a line over which they step in favor of one or the other. Dorothy Parker summed it up for me in her New Yorker column “The Constant Reader” when, in her review of The House at Pooh Corner, the reviewer wrote,

“ ‘Tiddely what?’ said Piglet.” (He took, as you might say, the very words out of your correspondent’s mouth.)

“ ‘Pom,’ said Pooh. ‘I put that in to make it more hummy.’ ”

And it is that word “hummy,” my darlings, that marks the first place in “The House at Pooh Corner” at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.

The adorable and hummy Loggins and Messina song notwithstanding, I’m with Dot.

I first read Le Petit Prince in my French class my senior year of high school, in the original French, bien sur, and I was enchanted. (I bought a hard copy in English around the same time, 1982, and know this because neither book has a universal price code on it, so they’re pretty old.) Essentially the character of the Little Prince is a desert hallucination by the writer and pilot Saint-Exupéry, who was persuaded to write a children’s book when he lived in Quebec. His books, by the way, were banned in Occupied France; he died in a crash during the war in 1944, when his plane went down for unknown reasons. I like to think the Little Prince greeted him.

A pilot who writes books, or a writer who pilots planes. I was thinking today about the habits we dabble in, like writing, water coloring, or collecting books. Preparing to draw my friend’s card to watercolor, I reached for this pencil holder that holds my art pencils I got for Scenic Design in college. One year, my dad made us kids (or maybe just me and Pat) pencil holder out of the trunk of the Christmas tree. I don’t know how he got the idea. But he drilled holes for pencils, stained it and varnished it (preventing shedding and splinters), and I still use it.

Another time he made all my brothers Zorro swords, and I didn’t get one because I’m a girl, so he whittled me a dagger. My mom painted the handle black and the blade red (for Halloween); I later repainted it silver to use a prop in a play, I think. I still have that, too.

In those years, my mom was doing a lot of decoupages. Little of it survives, unfortunately. She started by making a plaque for her Uncle Phil, a recovered alcoholic, whiskey bottle collector, and former bootlegger (along with his two brothers, including my grandfather) in the 1920s. She made one for us, too, this one antiqued green to go with our house’s color palette. It’s currently rotting in my brother Jeff’s storage unit, but I remember it well.

I love how my mom burned the edges. She made all kinds of things back then, all atop our washing machine covered in newspaper. Ca. 1975

So this is Miss O’ giving my mind a rest from the world today, mostly. What are you taking stabs at this Ides of March?

Hello? Brutus?

Sending love from Queens,

Miss O’

Slaying the Dragons

More thoughts on our national monsters

Hi, dear one. In my last post, I related how I’d recently read a book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer, and this week, by a serendipitous coincidence, PBS streaming has rereleased a series from 1987, The Power of Myth, a conversation between Bill Moyers and the great mythologist Joseph Campbell, who sadly died not long after the final interview. You can also get the companion book, created because the 6-hour series (filmed at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch) couldn’t contain all the insights.

Moving from monsters to dragons felt like a natural progression. Also, in another moment of serendipity, I had a conversation this week about the work of Patsy Rodenburg, a voice teacher and acting coach, and her work The Second Circle. All of this makes sense together in my mind, so we’ll see how I do.

In a society such as ours in 2025, I wondered what Joseph Campbell might be able to help me with. As it turns out, plenty. Bill Moyers is a great host, comfortable asking naïve questions, and while for the intelligentsia it’s tempting to make fun of him, he gets wonderful answers. Moyers, by the way, was President Johnson’s Chief of Staff and later Press Secretary (he called Johnson “fifteen of the most interesting men I ever met”); he is smart and educated (and still with us at age 90) as well as attuned to society, but he’s at ease with not knowing and relishes seeking to understand (which I find are the key qualities missing from today’s journalists as well as citizens).

In one episode of The Power of Myth, Campbell explains Star Wars as one of the most recent (then) examples of the hero’s journey (there’s a whole episode on that; Campbell’s work inspired Lucas) and what that mythology tells us. Myths, he explains, including hero’s journeys, are not about seeking meaning in life, but rather about experiencing life. Moyers and Campbell talk of the ways in which people follow church doctrine, for example, to guide them, or follow strict rules and procedures rather than their own instincts. Often, heroes have to abandon what they thought they knew to get through the challenges.

They talk of the struggle with temptations presented by the serpents (found in every culture) where there is an expected way to live, the tension between the body and the mind, between desire and outside rules. At one point, Moyers reflects on ordinary people’s lives and the hero’s journey, especially the moment that Luke Skywalker, in a life and death struggle with Vader, chooses not to go over the dark side.

Of this dramatic choice of good over evil Moyers says, feeling secure in himself, “But that isn’t what happens in my life.”

And Campbell quickly counters, “You bet it does. If the person doesn’t listen to the demands of his own spiritual and heart life, and insists on a certain program, you’re gonna have a schizophrenic crack up. The person has put himself off-center. He has aligned himself with a programmatic life. And it’s not the one the body’s interested in at all. The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.”

I don’t know about you, but it seemed to me this perfectly described this American moment.

Campbell and Moyers also talk about dragons, and Campbell’s take on dragons is fascinating to me—they guard. “The European dragon,” Campbell explains, “guards things in his cave, and what he guards are heaps of gold and virgins, two things, gold and virgins, and he can’t make use of either of them, but he just guards. There’s no vitality of experience…” In psychological terms, you’re binding yourself to your own ego, if you are dragon. (Campbell contrasts the negative European dragon with the “great and glorious” Chinese dragon—two very different things.) The dragon in us is our ego, “What I want, what I believe, what I see,” Campbell says, and “it might be too small.” To slay it, “you have to follow your bliss,” by which he means your true nature.

The Europeans, who colonized so much of earth, then, are based in a culture that fights those who hoard gold and virgins, and yet the heroes don’t fight the dragon for any other reason than to the take the gold and the virgins for themselves. Another perfect metaphor for America.

Campbell wouldn’t say that deciding to destroy others is anyone’s actual “bliss.” Annihilation of the innocent, the hoarding of gold, and rape of women cannot be bliss, because I see dead eyes in Trump, in Musk, in Speaker Johnson, in Vance. They are without souls let alone hearts. Anyone with access to their own hearts would follow President Zelenskyy anywhere because anyone can see Zelenskyy is Luke Skywalker; it’s not about him, this war, it’s about saving a country he loves. You may think that doing what you love “doesn’t save the world,” only yourself; but Campbell says that by saving yourself, you save the world. “An influence of a vital person vitalizes. There’s no doubt about it.” Otherwise, the world is a wasteland. Slava Ukraine.

“An ego that sees a ‘thou’ is not the same ego that sees an ‘it.’”

– mythology scholar Joseph Campbell on the difference between the relationship Indigenous people had with buffalo (“thou”) and that which the white man had with buffalo (“it”); see also, Putin with Ukrainians

Last week my friend Keith, an actor and writer, was in town working on contract negotiations for his union, and we met for dinner on Third Avenue Thursday evening. The dinner time changed from 5:30 to 7:30, so around 6:40 I left Queens for Grand Central, going down toward the back of the 7 Train to be nearer the Third Avenue/42nd Street exit when I arrived at the station. When I entered the car, there in the corner was a bearded man, quite filthy and disheveled and resembling Rip Torn, a faded red towel safety pinned like a cape around a grimy white tee shirt fragment. He was talking to himself in animated tones about a woman who was in pain, her feet, I think, and the narrative was taking place at a hospital. He’d caused the car to reek, though not many people were bothered. I was, though, so when I sat down in the only available seat, I casually rummaged in my cloth sling bag for a mask. (Since Covid, the option of wearing a mask allows us to give smelly people some grace, to not embarrass them by pulling collars up over our noses, or to have to beat an exit to run to the next car at the next stop; in NYC in summer, it’s not uncommon for one person’s stench to clear out a subway car and leave it empty at every stop for a whole day. Pro tip: NEVER get on an empty subway car on an otherwise full train; everyone does it. Once.)

Over dinner, Keith and I talked about many subjects, from poetry to opera to politics, when he mentioned he was going to Portugal to study with renowned voice teacher and acting coach Patsy Rodenburg, whose work I love. In a quick but inadequate summary, I can tell you that Rodenburg (whom I first heard of in an interview on NPR and saw later on video from Michael Howard Studios in New York) noticed over the years that she could distill actors’ energy into three “circles”: inward directed (First Circle), outer directed (Third Circle), and perfectly present (Second Circle). We need all three circles, and all three circles have their uses, but to be an effective actor, you must live in the second circle of true intimacy, fully present.

You see this in life—First Circle, the people scrolling their phones, or the cashier who won’t look at you; and on the other extreme, Third Circle, the salesmen, politicians on the campaign trail, preachers greeting parishioners. Miss O’ lives in second circle, as do many of my friends. Second circle can be unnerving to people who are not, as Campbell would say, able to follow their bliss. People who need a doctrine to cling to—the Ten Commandments, Project 2025, even the Rule of Law. Any doctrine can be leveraged for good or evil when people are not in Second Circle. (Trump, I suspect, lunges between First and Third circles all the time, which creates a violent imbalance. He hasn’t been in Second since infancy, where we are all in harmony.)

And this brings me to a deeper truth, perhaps the most unsettling to me. In the United States, we have no more rituals (beyond, what, morning coffee?), no mythologies, no common culture to bind us together. If we could be honest, tell the truth about our origins, all the complexities of colonization, genocide, slavery, revolution, enlightenment, the uses and abuse of Christianity, all of it—we could formulate a national mythology and enact rituals to guide us to growth and build further understanding. American Idol is the best we can do? The spectacle of competing for money and fame? Has The Apprentice taught us nothing?

At one point, Campbell uses our architecture to tell us who we are in the U.S. in the modern age. In Salt Lake City, he notes by way of example, first the Temple was the tallest structure (religion), then the Capitol dome (politics), and now the Office Building that handles the economic affairs of both is the tallest and biggest edifice (commerce). It’s the Symbol of modern life. What does this mean for us? “You can’t predict what a myth is going to be any more than you can predict what you are going to dream tonight. Myths and dreams come from the same place.” What is the new American dream?

In six weeks, we citizens watched helplessly, and Democratic leadership spinelessly, as Donald Trump destroyed 250 years of American law and governance, wiping out the mythology of a nation. Listening to Campbell, I gained historical perspective. Though Moyers switches quickly, in editing, away from his point, Campbell does passionately remind us that Indigenous people, in a mere ten years, lost everything in the way of their rituals, their sacred dependence on the buffalo, their freedom, their land, and thousands of years of a way of life. Like that.

We’re in the process of losing a few hundred years’ worth. It’s nothing by comparison. It’s just ours. And “ours” was never “everyone’s.” If we are honest.

Our struggle now (if there is an “us”) is recognizing the difference between the seductive serpent, the dragon to slay, and the vital person. Everyone made fun of Hillary Clinton when she said, “We have to change hearts and minds,” mocking her with, “It can’t be done.” Of course it can be done. As my theater hero Joseph Chaikin said, it isn’t done “en masse, but one by one by one by one.” We each do our best to be alive, and our aliveness brings life to the world. Moyers brings this around to the importance of teachers, of which group Campbell was a member. The therapists, the storytellers, the healers, the helpers, the educators: we help bolster the world, prepare our heroes, vitalize the works.

Coda: Keith walked me to the Grand Central around 10:00 PM, and I descended the stairs from the Third Avenue entrance. Down on the platform, I walked to where an old man, a blues and rock electric guitarist, played a history of the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix as two other musicians looked on. We thanked him, gave him a few dollar bills. When the train pulled in, we got on the car, and I smelled a familiar smell. I looked down the car and there, in the same seat with the same two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, was the same schizophrenic man. What are the odds? Weirdly, this sort of thing happens to me a lot in New York. But think of any number of small things that could have happened differently—the time I left home; or the time we left the restaurant; where I stood on the platform either way. It’s remarkable.

I pulled out my mask. The man sat alone, no longer chattering away but looking at us, lost; I think he vaguely recognized my hat. A needy citizen ignored, an “it” instead of a “thou,” someone else’s problem. The American ego.

I don’t know why, but thinking of all these stories and our ordinary workaday lives, I hear Pigpen’s voice in A Charlie Brown Christmas, when Linus points out that the dirt and dust on Pigpen could be from the soils carried across the ocean from ancient Egypt, to which Pigpen, adjusting his costume says, “Sorta makes you have a little more respect for me, doesn’t it?” Maybe Peanuts feels like it could be a start for our mythology, if we tried. We could do a lot worse.

(Thanks, internet.)

I do go on. Happy Sunday. I really should get out of bed.

Love,

Miss O’

Sunday Sermon

Thoughts from the produce aisle of a grocery store

Yesterday after I published my latest post, I walked to the grocery store to pick up vegetables for some kind of Italian wedding soup I had an idea for as a meal for my friends on Sunday (today). I took a hand basket and walked the outer aisle for celery (check), carrots (check), spinach (check), and was turning to find an onion when I noticed a young man (Black, slender) putting back a prewashed spinach container when he saw the expiration date. “Too soon?” I asked, as I do. “I can’t eat all that by tomorrow,” he said. “You know,” I said, and he turned to listen because I do have an arresting teacher voice, “you can always blanche what’s left, now you can’t do that with these other lettuces,” I gestured, “and put in a baggie and freeze it.” He tilted his head thoughtfully, “I never knew that.” I said, my gray braids on full display as it was too warm for a hat, “That is what the age buys you.” I could see there was no more to be said. Would he do it? Who knows. I turned to find my onion.

I also wanted to pick up unsalted pistachios. In this store, the nuts are in not one, not two, but five different locations (at least) in the produce section. I think the idea is to surprise you everywhere with a nutty idea, or maybe it’s just easier to stash them under the fruit and vegetable displays, but it took me several trips around to find the right stand. I saw the young man walked back and forth looking at the prewashed leafy greens, and just before I located my nuts, the man made a point of walking by me to say, “I’m going to try it,” and I raised my arms high and cried, “Success!”

Here’s what I know about learning after 38 years in education and editing: learning never happens at the moment of impact. I’ve told you this many times, but as with all wisdom, it bears repeating. You tell someone something, teach it, and then you have to allow the student to sort of internalize it, reflect on it, and decide how they will respond. We are a very impatient society, we want it all now, in America. I was like that as a young teacher, expecting that because I told them, whatever it was, it would stick. Later you learn that because you are rushing on to another concept, you have to repeat the lesson, on whatever it was, periodically, just to jar a student’s memory.

And it got me thinking how neither Republicans nor Democrats leave time for reflection. What Republicans do is pick one or two messages and repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. They hammer those two messages home for a month; once implanted, they pick two more messages and repeat and repeat until those are implanted. After a short time, their base has four or six messages—blame Blacks, blame Democrats, no taxes, no abortions, no schools, no immigrants—to glom onto until the election cycle is over.

Democrats, by contrast, have a more nuanced base, and they don’t appreciate that enough. Repeated messages on a finite number of things—Trump is unhinged, Project 2025 is bad, women need bodily autonomy—don’t land because they are not elaborated on sufficiently, but also because Dem leaders don’t remember that the base is also being bombarded with lies that they have to think about how to counter.

No one has time for reflection in either political scenario.

A good politician, I think, needs to behave like an experienced teacher. Miss O’ didn’t just say to the young man, “You can freeze it.” I explained how: “You can blanche it, and put it in a baggy, and freeze it.” And because we both had shopping to do, and no lives were in the balance, I left it at that. He had time to reflect, and I suspect Miss O’s continued presence in the produce department, on the hunt for what he had no idea, but still present, reminded him he could keep thinking about what he’d been taught.

Telling anyone once, without reinforcement, is like not telling them at all.

Telling them too many times, without evidence or example, is propaganda.

If this democracy is to survive—and it all hinges on Ukraine, one Eastern European nation, defeating not one but two allied superpowers—the United States and Russia—we have to figure out how to message to the American people.

Our legacy press, now almost fully allied with Trump, is useless.

Independents on social media can only do so much.

But I keep remembering that the American Revolution was won on horseback, word by word by word, passed along when people had time to think, when they weren’t distracted by anything that didn’t mean survival.

So here I am, passing a word. You do it, too.

Sending love and the amassed wisdom of age,

Miss O’

Wild Kingdom

Thoughts on the state of things in the state

Mar 01, 2025

If you’re around my age and had a television growing up, you remember Sunday nights on NBC with Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, which premiered (I read) in 1963 (you can still see the modern take on Animal Planet). It came on before The Wonderful World of Disney, which didn’t interest me—I think we turned it over to Hee Haw. Anyway, the show presented visits to the wild places of Earth, and Marlin Perkins (the zoologist host) and Jim Fowler (who seemed to do the real work) offered insights and commentary. It filled you with wonder, but more than that, for me, danger. I contrast that experience with once I have had as an adult watching Sir David Attenborough on PBS’s Nature programs, where the presenter expresses awe, delight, curiosity, and gratitude, all at once. Both programs came of age during fairly early television, with black and white cameras (or, in my case, a black and white television) to color. In Attenborough’s case, I learned from a documentary I watched last night that he’s won awards for all the phases of camera technology development, up to age 88!, beginning with black and white cameras, followed by color photography, to HD, 3-D, and now 4DX—the most advanced technology we have, most recently using animations and acting to tell the story, ironically, of animals of the past.

It’s here that I have to compare Attenborough to Thomas Bewick (say Buick), the 18th-19th century engraver whose engraved illustrations of British birds as well as many other animals gave the world its first affordable visuals, ones average people hadn’t had before. (I’ve mentioned in earlier posts that I recently read a book about Bewick’s life.) Watercolors and oil paintings of animals were in private collections and printed only in the most expensive editions, so common people in villages and towns might who had only heard about a camel for example, could see one. One famous flightless bird, the Dodo, for example was one such creature Bewick engraved. That bird of legend had gone extinct even before Bewick’s day, and it’s a bird that Attenborough also talks about in the 4DX in the last show he did in 2016, Museum Alive. (He’s still alive, by the way, at 98. Bewick would be 271.)

Bewick’s Dodo, best guess based on maritime descriptions of the time and other people’s sketches. The one in the British Natural History Museum is a composite guess using the body and feathers of other birds. What is it about white men that their first impulse on seeing any unknown creature is to kill it?

Both Attenborough and Bewick love/loved wild places, wildlife. They love/loved working in their preferred mediums, television and engraving, respectively, and to use their arts to share this wonder with the world, with the common audience.

All this gets me thinking about all the ways we illustrate and instruct on the world around us, and how we used to unite around the common cause of our shared planet. When Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, came out in the 1962, the one thing that everyone upset and focused them on ecology and caring was the possibility of the loss of songbirds.

Imagine that. If you have had the pleasure of sitting in my parents’ bird sanctuary of a suburban backyard, let me assure you can sit on that patio swing for hours and never be bored. Once all the birds forget you are there, it’s a party, the best kind of show.

Lately, America and the world have become focused on a collection of primates but not for the biodiversity and wonder and joy they bring. Instead, it’s a nature Reality Show from Hell.

Yesterday, as the world watched, any sentient human cringed. Vance and Trump’s treatment of President Zelenskyy of Ukraine was beyond the beyond, trying to leverage their own favor-currying of Putin by placing the beholden Zelenskyy in front of right-wing American television cameras and reporters, to cow him, as if this man has not been enduring full-scale war for three years trying to save the democracy he loves. Lights, cameras? Bullying? 1) Have they no shame? 2) Are they high? 3) Fuck them.

Like nature at one time, democracy had been a common global cause for many, many years, but no more. President Zelenskyy is like the compelling, knowledgeable zoologist visiting a new kind of American wild kingdom in a television series, facing two aggressive and deeply stupid primates who exist only in captivity. It was, as you know, horrifying to watch.

President Zelenskyy prevailed. I hope he wins this war; he’s already won history. I don’t want Ukraine or him to go extinct.

All of this is just to say, Slava Earth, Slava Ukraine.

Home bulletin board detail. Queens kitchen.

Until the next episode of the Trump Wild Kingdom Shit Show, do beautiful things, somehow.

Sending love from Queens,

Miss O’

An Ordinary Day

On missing days of normalcy, and making them

It’s an ordinary Saturday in Queens, which is to say “ordinary” if you aren’t thinking about the fascism. (I really can’t get over the way that Meta bleeps “Nazi” and “swastika” from videos, or that posters have to insert an * somewhere in each of those words so the post passes muster, even as Elon’s and Bannon’s sieg heils are fine.) I am waiting on a 7 Train, only to learn it’s not going all the way to Manhattan, so I have to switch the N or W, so my mind does a little adjustment. It’s all good.

There used to be moments when, as my friend George puts it, it seems Americans are simply going to be inconvenienced to death. Now, unfortunately, and for a long foreseeable future, we are under threat of annihilation. But today, I’m heading to The Chain Theater at 312 W. 36th Street in Manhattan to see the 2 PM installment of their rolling rep One Act Play Festival, and today I don’t want to think about annihilation.

When I arrived at Times Square/42nd Street, I walked through Golda Meir Plaza, struck again that in the 1970s we had female leaders like Meir of Israel and Indira Gandhi of India, Thatcher in ’80s Britain, and that the United States couldn’t even manage one woman in 250 years, choosing an avowed white supremacist dictator, twice, over a highly qualified, democratic woman. And here we are, I think, wondering as I keep walking what will happen to the bust of Meir.

First, I have to go to the ATM, and for some reason my card chip will never work to open the door; another customer, a man in a hood, has a card that opens the door; he engages in no talk. I go in behind him, and I realize I’m shaking. I find I’m afraid to use the machine until I see him at the other machine, and really getting money; I finish before he does, even having to enter my PIN twice to get it right. Odd, having the shakes like that. Or not so odd. Frankly, that’s as fearful as I want to be in life.

It’s nice out, 40s, sun. I walk down 7th Avenue, taking it in, struck again how I can always spot a tourist. I am of New York City, I move that way, more grounded, a bubble of insulation and also awareness. I was a tourist for 20 years before I moved here, so I don’t mean this as criticism or praise; it just is.

I arrive a half hour before the play festival is to start. I see Mary, the director of my friend Colleen’s play, in the crowded lobby, and we hug. I check in at the desk, my friend Tom having bought our tickets online. Our friends David and Barry are also coming, and learning the afternoon is sold out, I go in when the house opens and save us a row, as it’s general seating. An older woman in the row behind me is doing the same thing. (It’s always funny to me how everyone who enters a general seating situation somehow believes they will get to sit alone, empty of audience members around them, and they look at my saved seats with resentment.) The boys show up just before 2 PM, so we don’t get to visit much, and they don’t have time to go out after. I seem to be the only person I know in the city who has nothing but time. Ah, well. Still, being in this community even for a brief time is comforting and energizing. Hopeful.

For the uninitiated: Attending a play festival of new work, especially one-acts, can be a crapshoot. I’ve attended many of these, both as a high school director and as an audience member in New York, and too often only two out of the five or six are well-written, and only one or two are well-acted and directed, and often it’s not the same set of two. So imagine my delight—I knew Colleen’s would be adorable because I’d read the stage directions for it at a workshop—when all five were simply excellent.

The common theme—and this was a really thoughtful grouping—was aging and death. This might sound awfully close to that annihilation I was avoiding, but it wasn’t the case. The first play was a monologue, a 60-year-old son eulogizing his father at the funeral; the second, two old people on the E Train platform; the third an older man trying to make a deal with Death; the fourth was Colleen’s (a play inspired by seeing a plaque in Evanston, Indiana, along the Ohio River, where President-elect James K. Polk was to have stopped his steamship and didn’t disembark), with an old woman (Colleen) and her grandson in 1854, the year Lincoln was really getting started; and the last a gay couple, older men, one who has, we see gradually, dementia. And all of these were by turns serious, funny, sweet, surprising. And ultimately, ordinary, in the best sense. Life lived.

I’ve realized lately that what I crave most in my music, my art, my nature, and my life, even, is ordinariness. I don’t want the surreal, the challenging, the wildly surprising. I get too much of that in unending loops in American society now, breathless, mean, chaotic, and all that hate and chaos, while not remotely sustainable, will be unending for four years at the very least, and if we all don’t stroke out and live to see another election, we may see a divine revolution. Until then, I want mundanity as a life theme.

For example, here’s a task of basic maintenance.
Simple chores. I did the annual bowl oiling during my lunch break one day since I work from home. So restful. Once the oil soaks in, they’re good to go for a year. I oil the cutting boards at least twice a year. Isn’t it nice to focus on that?

As another mundane activity, before leaving for the subway with a half hour to spare once dressed (I took care to pick my ensemble and accessories, knowing no one else would actually care, but it’s my inside feeling that counts), I noticed that I have a lot of loose knobs on my two dressers. One dresser requires a Philips head and one a flathead screwdriver. I keep these in a pitcher by the door—I like to have my tools ready at hand. Knob by knob, I tightened them. In doing this I noticed a few scratches, so I went to my tool closet and found the wax wood filler pencil. And I filled the scratches, and it’s funny how the more you fix the more you see.

And this by the way task was really satisfying. You know what I mean? And centering, before heading out into the chaos of New York’s mass transit.

Why do we have to exist in all this rage and war and hate and aggression and greed and chaos? We all have knobs that need tightening. Why, just because of a few psychotic, damaged men who cannot be satisfied or fulfilled by all the money and power in the world, do all the rest of us have to suffer for all time? Why do other people, people with absolutely no hope at all of either wealth or power, follow them, go psycho with them, and go after all the rest of us? Don’t THEY have knobs?

From the web.

I was thinking too about AI, how the goal is to replace humans, to erase humanity, and that AI cannot tighten knobs. How are we to cope with the attempted erasure of culture, of women’s sovereignty, of black and brown people, of the earth itself, when this desire for annihilation is beyond lunacy? Why can’t we be? Being is hard enough. Knobs come loose. Why can’t we work together to solve real problems?

From the web.

To cope with the whole mess, as I brace for some kind of war, I’m taking more and more pleasure in the very ordinary, like watching people on the subway.

A Study of Knees and Nylons. N Train to Queens. LO’H 2025

I know I can’t be alone in these chaotic feelings. How are you coping? In addition to doing chores, seeing art, and attending the occasional rally, I’m calling politicians and listening to Nina Simone. Followed by Yo-Yo Ma. You?

In the meantime, don’t be a stranger.

Sending love from whatever fresh hell this is,

Miss O’

What’s Not Lost in Translation

Moments in my chaotic New York City week

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

Thank you, internet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of Miss O’s many, many notebooks.

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

It’s been a long three weeks. Encouragement!

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

Love,

Miss O’

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

A Work in Progress, Part 1

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

Love, Lisa

WAVY DAVY’S PERPETUAL SOUP HOUSE KITCHEN

A PLAY by Lisa O’Hara

ACT I, SCENE 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

PHIL: …the flinching ones…

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

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

SCENE 2

[Projected: 1988]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JUNIE: [lifting a ladle] Who wants soup?

SCENE 3

[Music. Projected:] 1973

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

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

PHIL: My inventions are useful.

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

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

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

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

PHIL: [moving his queen] Language. Check.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GARY: Take it back.

PHIL: Which part?

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

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

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

SCENE 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DAVY: [offstage] Faster, faster, faster!

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

SCENE 5

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

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

Act I, Scene 6

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

PHIL: [reading] “Spiro Agnew disbarred.”

DAVY: Was he now.

GARY: I think Agnew got a rotten deal.

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

MARV: [a mock scolding] Language, Phil!

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

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

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

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

MARV: Except for the war taxes.

DAVY: Fuck the war taxes.

PHIL: Do you, Gary?

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

MARV: In cash, who’s to know?

[Junie interrupts waving an envelope.]

JUNIE: Hey, Gary.

GARY: Is that the rent?

PHIL: Your tax-free rent, oh Landlord.

DAVY: Do we Deep Throat him?

GARY: That’s your department.

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

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

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

MARV: I feel art coming.

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

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

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

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

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

MARV: [imitating GLADYS] Language!

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

GARY: [looks under table] Mom?

DAVY: Beatles or Stones?

ALL: Beatles.

MARV: Acoustic Dylan or electric Dylan?

ALL: All the Dylans!

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

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

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

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

MARV: “Leaking?”

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

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

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

GARY: My dad says I am not a Negro.

MARV: What does that mean?

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

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

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

DAVY: How can anyone know where humans came from?

GARY: My dad says it’s aliens.

PHIL: So are we Americans or aliens?

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

MARV: Where did the aliens come from?

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

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

DAVY: They are? How come?

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

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

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

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

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

PHIL: You like the capes!

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

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

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

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

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

[CAROL ONE, enters with Lysol.]

CAROL ONE: You are terrible.

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

CAROL ONE: You think you are so cute.

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

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

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

Act I, Scene 7

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

GLADYS: So how does Junie know you?

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

GLADYS: You both live in Arlington?

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

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

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

MARK: That’s what we hear.

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

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

MARK: So during Rolling Thunder, huh.

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

ROGER: How old?

JUNIE: Eighteen, almost nineteen.

MARK: How old were you?

JUNIE: Seventeen.

GLADYS: Irish twins.

JUNIE: [picking up a loaf] Bread?

[MARV enters with satchel.]

MARV: Hello.

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

JUNIE: Soup?

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

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

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

ROGER: What’s the Holocaust?

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

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

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

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

PHIL: Oh, hello.

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

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