Tag: writing

A Life in the Theater

On character, tragic flaws, and hope

Nov 09, 2025

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.

Sending love and balance,

Miss O’

How to Say Grace

“You pollute the air.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love your neighbors through this crazy Republican endgame.

And vote while you still can.

“Grouchy Resilience”

A week off with art and the city, with photos

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

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

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

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

Then Paxton’s tea girls:

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

Close. But not feeling shiny yet.

Thursday, I rested.

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

Bingo.

The cap on the beat:

Perfect. Breezy, calm, cool.

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

Sending love, renewed, from New York City,

Miss O’

What Would You Like for Crunch?

A few reflections on my mom, Lynne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best reason for Google.

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

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

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

Crunch.

Sending love,

Miss O’

Some Art Belongs in the Kitchen

Art as Independence Day

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

And here we are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s no art in this White House.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where’d that country go?

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

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

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

We are rudderless and joyless.

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

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

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

The challenges and the triumphs that we shared and celebrated.

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

We are lost.

We have lost so much in so short a time.

– Elayne Griffin Baker

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

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

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

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

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

Their empire of dirt, indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

Miss O’s kitchen, with assorted art.

Maybe start in the kitchen.

Love,

Miss O’

Muses of Madness

Art Spiegelman, Mad Magazine, and my childhood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Addendum to my last post’s prescient Onion headline.

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

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

Sending love,

Miss O’

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’