Tag: writing

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.

On the Decision to Leave Facebook

Searching for My Sanity

I’m sitting in my kitchen this Sunday, January 12, 2025, a week before the inauguration of the End of Times, feeling lucky and grateful to have a kitchen, and a rocker, and coffee, and art supplies; and despite some aches and pains (and as far as I know), my health. I was able to take a warm shower last night, and sleep in a warm bed covered in Irish knitted blankets and clean sheets. I awoke a little late this weekend morning because I could. The day is a cold, crisp, blue sky winter day in New York City, and by the grace of a good job (still in education after 37 years) and having bought my apartment 20 years ago instead of, say, last week, I get to live here, and affordably. Knock wood.

What I’m wondering about today, all these blessings notwithstanding given the wretched suffering of humans and the planet’s ecosystems as a result of sociopathic, capitalist policies and general stupidity, is whether or not I should continue using social media to communicate. (How privileged am I?) But really what I’m wondering is to do with the point of this whole tower of Babel, all of us voicing our views all the time via TikTok, Facebook, Twitter (X), Instagram, BlueSky, Substack, Medium, Blogger, WordPress, pick a platform. We can write, text, photograph, video, podcast, share it out en masse. So many of us with so much to say. Who is the audience? And to what end? I’m probably overthinking this.

I know from “stats,” for example, that after roughly 24 people “open” this post, approximately two people will read past the first two paragraphs. Possibly one person will finish the whole post. I suspect that person is almost always the same person, occasionally joined by one or two others. One occasional reader will “like” this post on Facebook without having read it (I know because the “like” comes within seconds of posting it) so as to be encouraging. One person may “like” the post at the source, such as on Substack or WordPress. I have “followers” on these sites, and “likes” are swell, but I have to say that none of this is what I’m after when I publish a piece.

Love Letters

As I’ve written before in many blog posts few have read, I write blogs because I miss writing longform letters. Whenever I was feeling really lost and out of sorts back in my youthful teaching days, for example, I would reflect on how many letters I’d sent and received in recent weeks. This would lead to me sitting down to type letters on my Smith-Corona (no carbons, so none of my long letters survive, I suspect), one to four pages, maybe six, single-spaced, on colorful letter paper, to five or six recipients at a go. Every letter had a different voice, subject, and slant, given the audience. Sometimes I included a folded article from The New Yorker or the Washington Post. By Sunday evening, after writing letters between grading stacks of papers—those letters addressed, stamped, and stickered with a return address and something pretty—I was a new girl. Monday morning I’d mail the letters from the school office where I taught, and I could feel breath return to my body. Letters meant connection to the wider world, to the hearts of my friends. I gave them pieces of my heart, and when I posted, I felt that my heart regenerated, times two.

The coming weeks ensured a return post from nearly all the recipients, from, say, my one living grandmother in Council Bluffs, Iowa; my former landlady and other friends in Central Virginia; my former costume design professor at Virginia Tech; my Bread Loaf friends in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, Tennessee, and Kuwait (or wherever she was teaching internationally that year). I no longer recall what I wrote in those letters, but I still have all the letters I received back. They fill half a closet, shoe boxes within boxes, and I treasure them as one would rare artifacts. I suspect that my trove may well be the last of the letters that humans will ever see, certainly over 60 years in America in the late 20th to 21st centuries. But that isn’t why I keep them. They are reminders of the ways we filled one another’s hearts, and deeply, once. To me every letter is a love letter.

The Social Network

One thing I’ve become sad about in the past decade is how social media, including texting, has been used as a replacement for letters and personal conversations. I no longer get that Pavlov’s dogs “warm feeling” when I hear the arrival of mail dropping through the slot. Junk in the form of requests from charities, a catalog, a flyer from a theater, a medical bill—these are all I can expect. When I do get personal mail—as small package, a postcard, or a card for an occasion—I do relish the note, usually very short, and mostly respond in kind. And I do love my sibling text threads; and some texting is an important way of writing brief letters with some old friends, so there is that.

We all have shorter attention spans, of course, technological “advances” being what they are, causing our brains to have been rewired to be more in line with ADHD tech developers (my personal theory) and less so with the slower and more deeply thinking (though not necessarily genius-level) people like me. Still, I think there is something to be said for being able to be quiet, and deep, and I miss it.

But what I am missing, more specifically, is the forging and maintaining of intimacy.

Instead of enjoying deep communion with friends, I, more often than not, provide and receive sound bites and sermons and memes. It’s all fun and games, however deeply felt our stories and rants, however witty or sweet or artful the picture posts. Less and less, I’m feeling that my life can be “both/and” when it comes to deep connection and social media on a platform. My brain and my heart feel frayed, like an old quilt, maybe, that I stopped really valuing and only look at out of habit.

Time Travels

I look at how the letters my parents received dwindled once they reached their 40s, when they and all their friends “back home” became busy with lots of children, school programs, second jobs; when aunts and uncles began dying. Distance and lack of time prevent us from keeping up with everyone; it’s life, and “everyone” is too many. It’s why we have reunions every decade or make special trips once or twice in our lives, or every Christmas, to reconnect with old friends. We also used to call people on the phone for a daily chat, or to faraway relatives on special occasions, but those calls were rare. I think my dad only called his mother two or three times a year, families then still mindful of the Depression and the charges for long distance. By contrast, when I was a teenager, I could stay on the phone for hours with a friend I’d seen all day at school. You remember.

While the invention of social media has afforded us a chance to quickly and easily locate, “friend,” and play voyeur into the lives of dozens, hundreds, thousands of long-lost chums and recent acquaintances, and to share our own photos and points of view, I’m wondering if it has been worth sacrificing depth for breadth, or when it started to feel like a sacrifice. I ask because I have never been lonelier in my life.

Possibly this is because I am sixty, and live alone (I am self-aware enough to realize I’m too odd to live any other way), and even if I weren’t single, I would be right back where my parents were, never hearing from anyone either, even if this isn’t 1973. I don’t want to devolve into nostalgia.

But what has happened in the past decade is that too many formerly intimate friends have relied on their social media posts—posts sent out to dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of friends or followers—as their sole means of communication with me, Miss O’ lumped among the throng. I stopped even texting some friends when the reply became, “Don’t you read by Facebook?” or took the form of an emoji, a heart or a unicorn, say, as if to express, “What makes you think you are so special that I would take time out of my active life to respond only to you personally?”

I had become a unicorn, but not special in the way of that creature so that anyone would want to seek me out. Have I done this to other friends? (Was it something I said?) A few years ago, I withdrew myself from a group text thread of friends when I realized that no one responded to anything I wrote. One friend said later, “I’m sorry that’s your perception.” No, that was the reality, as I saw the receipts. The good thing that came out of it was a restored one-on-one friendship with two of those people, much more personal and real, if you know what I mean. And more me, more fulfilling.

I will say, as far as media goes, the technology that is Zoom has been a godsend, and was especially so during Covid. Two couples, Anna and Michael in California and Frances and Jim in New Jersey, joined me for long, long conversations every few weeks during all those unlimited-use months during 2020-2021. We talked, read excerpts of books aloud, moved our computers to the kitchen to fix dinner or experiment with new cocktails, gave each other tours of our homes. In a culture that really isn’t into letter writing that much, now me included, Zoom became our way of sharing and connecting when there was no other way to get together.

So My Friend Susan Announced She’s Leaving Facebook

This was the spark of today’s blog. Susan is the kind of person who uses social media in the best way. She shares her family stories and adventures with the perfect amount of wit and detail that it’s like you are sitting at the kitchen table with her. She makes 2,000 people at a time feel that way, and it’s a real gift. I used to share fun little moments in New York City, and even self-published a little eBook to compile them (at the request of my friend Becca), but more and more my own use of the platform has turned into political screeds against stupidity. To the two-dozen sweet people who regularly nod in agreement with one or more of those posts, I am glad we can commiserate.

Because of the current state of society and disappearance of anything resembling an objective corporate press, we currently have political reasons for questioning the use of social media. “Meta,” for example, has announced this new “anti-censorship” policy, as “X” has done, which really boils down to “Feel free to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” (which I learned as a student in Mr. Hart’s fifth grade class is illegal as well as immoral). This is why Susan is leaving. I asked, “Have you considered writing a blog?”

The Open Blog Culture

Blog culture can be so much pissing in the wind, I guess, but there’s something rather dear about it, I think. Those of us so inclined can pour out our hearts in longform letters without postage. (Note: several of my artistic writer friends find my blogs unreadable or disappointingly un-writerly, etc., and my view is that they wouldn’t send back a critique of a letter, now, would they? So. Maybe sit on that and spin. I say that with love.) And while I still make personal cards with collages and quotations, and send short notes periodically, I will say writing a blog post fills the need I feel (mostly, though I feel it less and less, finding I have less and less to say, or at any rate to say to you, my friend(s)) to write a complete idea, or to explore an idea as completely as I have the mind to in the moment. However, while this act sorts my brain, my heart does not regenerate, not exactly. I do miss that.

Let me hear from you, should you feel that, too, but not on Facebook. I think that one will have to go. I will do a gradual release, though; it’s the only way I hear about deaths, for example, or childhood friends and former students in success or distress. I like Instagram, but the only posts I see in my feed—all my own doing because I “followed” them—include political news about He That Shall Not Be Named, and only one or two sweet photos from actual dear friends. I tried BlueSky, but it’s become all-HTSNBN-all-the-time, too. No one, it seems, knows how to get off that ride, and no amount of posting my distress about that is going to change anything. I feel my brain atrophying just thinking about it.

All that time I spend worrying on social media—what else might I be doing instead?

Now it’s noon, and I need to go for a long walk and see what’s doing in the neighborhood. Maybe I’ll call somebody later, who knows. What about you?

Sending love,

Miss O’

P.S. I have another blog on Substack, and have duplicated the posts. However, I think I will use this space to do more creative work. Will see what happens–and thanks for reading, in any case.

Last-Minute Saves: Completing the Assignment

On Friday at work, on a Zoom call with the “team” and managers and the director of the division and a program “author” who is guiding our work, there was a pause after 40 minutes of presentation and feedback from the author to ask questions. I asked a good question, one I really wanted the answer to. The author relished answering it. I asked clarifying questions, and he answered those. It was hard to read my director’s face, but I know the team was glad of the questions, given the “Directly to you” notes on the Chat feature of Zoom, “Great question,” “I’m so glad you asked that,” etc.

When I left the meeting, I said to myself, “Well, Lisa, once again you may have saved your job.” What I asked—after months of keeping my head down and being quiet as we embarked on this new project—and how the author answered, may well indeed have provided a breakthrough for what will make the next version of the product really special and useful for teachers and students.

My whole life, I reflected this afternoon, has been a series of last-minute saves.

When I was a Christmas tree shearer one summer in the Blue Ridge Mountains, for example, I was having a hard time keeping up, and my rows, though sheared well enough, took me twice as long as others on the crew to complete. After several days of this that first week, I determined to keep pace with a woman next to me, because she was a good shearer and very fast. And keep pace I did. I learned the next day that one of our other crew members had been fired for slow work and because “his trees weren’t good enough.” The crew chief, Sharon, I’m sure would have fired me too, and it would have killed my spirit. Something inside me saved me from this fate.

In a writing workshop in my senior summer of graduate school, after a mediocre first attempt at a short story, and a second attempt that my professor felt was as good as it would get and not in need of a workshop, I wondered if I’d ever write a third and final piece worthy of the work everyone else was doing. I was certainly vocal—participating, challenging, encouraging—and if I’m going to talk that much about how I receive writing, surely I should write something worth reading. And one evening in my dorm room overlooking the lawns at sunset just after supper, I found myself writing in a blaze, a fictional account of my great grandmother’s life in Iowa. It all came in one night, with a crucial misspelling my professor mentioned in the dining hall at breakfast after he’d read the story prior to the day’s workshop. I raced to the computer lab and did the ol’ Control/Find, and I could tell he was pleased by my passion. A student in the workshop gave me a bottle of wine before class, “For the best story of the summer.” How did this happen?

I had a similar save in my second summer of graduate school at the Oxford campus. I was studying Virginia Woolf with an eminent Exeter College scholar who also taught James Joyce. After reading a collection of short fiction, Jacob’s Room, and Mrs. Dalloway, I had to produce my first paper. What would I write about? I decided it had to be Mrs. Dalloway, but what about it? I had no idea. I just couldn’t think. That evening, my friend Anna, who was taking a different course focus that summer, came by my room to see if I still wanted to go to the cinemas and see Howards End, just released, starring Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, and Helena Bonham Carter. I told her my dilemma. “When is it due?” she asked. “Tomorrow,” I said. I sighed. “Let’s just go to the movies.” She was stunned. “No, really,” I said, gathering my things, getting my keys, “because I’m not going to figure it out just sitting here.”

We went to an 8 PM showing, I’m sure, because dinner in Hall was at 6 PM. And it was there, at Howards End, that the key to Mrs. Dalloway unlocked: Emma Thompson and her now husband Anthony Hopkins have learned that Emma’s sister Helena Bonham Carter is pregnant out of wedlock. In the garden, Emma is seated as Anthony paces, determining what is best to do. Emma keeps trying to get up, to go to her sister, to try to take action based on her own conscience. To stop her, to take control, the paternal hands of Anthony Hopkins press and press on his wife’s shoulders to keep her seated, to keep her in the garden.

And my mind exploded: there is a scene in Mrs. Dalloway that had puzzled me as to why it was there at all, which is a luncheon to which a certain Lady Bruton has invited Richard Dalloway, Clarissa’s husband, and a doctor (who is treating Clarissa’s nerves). Lady Bruton has a letter she wants to write to the London Times, and her point of view on the issue is liberal, one might say, and feminist. Yet by the end of lunch, the two men have explained to her what she really means, “Oh, do I?” she says, which is the opposite of her original point, and they write the letter for her. Those paternal hands pressing her feminist shoulders to keep her in the chair in the garden. I was saved.

You might look at these saves and think, it’s just a job, or just a class, or just a paper—it’s easy to diminish the experiences, I guess, but that’s not fair to anyone living this life. This is about that thing inside us, the thing that knows and opens and doesn’t fear, that does the work but also lets go to allow the “thing” to come, to be.

It was this that I witnessed in the person of Vice President Kamala Harris at the Presidential Debate on Tuesday night, September 12, 2024. She found the “thing” to rattle the motherfucker Donald Trump: the small size and demonstrable boredom attending his rallies. And from that moment on he was toast.

Lost because of that moment and its aftermath of verbal carnage, lost on the American press, as usual, was Harris’s masterful grasp of complex policy issues, foreign and domestic, none with easy solutions but with clear and important ideas to address and solve problems. After nine years, on the other hand, a clearly demented Trump revealed that as to replacing Obamacare, he has “concepts of a plan.” (As veteran retired high school teacher Tim Walz recounted this at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, “My students had better excuses than that for not doing the work.”) Harris laughed.

Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and I are all the same age. Born in 1964, we are the last year of the Baby Boom, the year before Gen X. As a result, we were both the responsible adults in the room even as children and also the last feral children out playing till dark all summer long; and, in addition, we get all the Monty Python jokes. I feel this in them, the kinship of that cross-section, people who do the work of the grownups but are loose enough to allow the realness to be and with humor. It’s helped sustain Harris and Walz in their brilliant and varied careers, I have no doubt. It’s done the same for me in my less brilliant but no less varied careers, too. Being adult and being real and being funny: it’s saved us.

With Harris and Walz and that generational realness, we have a chance to save this country. We can save it. Let’s save it.

Love,

Miss O’

Miss O’ recognizes, nay, feels, all these teacher faces. Credit to @AnandWrites

On Orlando and Transitions

Meditations on Transgender Humans

From the NYPL exhibit on Virginia Woolf, 2023. Photo by LO’H

A couple of years ago, the social media posts of “Sam,” a young gay man in his 30s, the beloved former student of a late teacher friend of mine, began shifting from a fun social and work life to marking a life in transition. First, Sam shared multiple moves, the most alarming (to me) was a move (for work) to a dangerously bigoted Southern state, where he was determined to make a go, build a community, and change hearts and minds. As life there, despite his best efforts, became less and less tolerable, he found himself in transit yet again, back to a major city in his home state. Shortly after this move, about which he detailed his joyful creation of a new home with the help of many friends, he began including pictures of himself in “feminine” clothes and accessories (pictures that reminded me of Tom Wilkinson’s character in the landmark film Normal.) Not long after, Sam formally announced that he was beginning a formal transition from “male” (assigned at birth) to “female,” which Sam said was the gender he had always felt he was. What has followed includes his documenting phases of this journey, including legal name and gender changes on his/her/their identification cards, photo records of a shift from pants to dresses and in a face in full makeup, the results of their hormone treatments, and most recently and significantly, a diary of their gender reassignment surgery, their plastic surgery to make their face more feminine, and the post-op difficulties that are part of the process.

For my own part, as an advocate and ally of the LGBTQ+ community, I have found watching this process overall to be troubling. Because I haven’t understand the source of my feelings, and because I still don’t know how best to be supportive in an honest way, I made a decision not to “heart” Sam’s posts, but instead to follow them at a distance, as it were, while working on myself to get a handle on what “transgender” means and how best to understand my muddled response to it.

The start of my own encounters with this cultural shift began by seeing cabaret. One of my favorite live performers in New York is Justin Vivian Bond, who as Justin Bond made a name in the downtown cabaret scene (and later, on Broadway, where I first saw them) in the character of singer Kiki DuRane in the duo Kiki and Herb, with Kenny Mellman as the always supportive Herb on piano. When Bond made a decision to present as female and then transition (with hormone treatments, but forgoing gender reassignment surgery), I remember items in New York magazines taking the famously cross-dressing Bond to task, saying, “Vivian? Now you’re going too far,” that sort of thing. Mr. Bond became Mx. Bond, doubled down on their activism, and used music and humor to include the story of transition into their act. “Am I he, she? I don’t know what I am,” Mx. Viv said at Joe’s Pub one night during a tribute to Judy Collins, who was there to introduce Bond and their band; Judy had used feminine pronouns, asking, “Am I using the right ones?” and in response, Viv (who presents tipsy as part of the act) said he/she/they didn’t really care either way. At the time, the idea of changing pronouns was a fairly recent idea, and we were all on shaky ground. Why not acknowledge that?

Justin Vivian Bond in performance at Joe’s Pub, November 2023. Photo by LO’H.

As a society, we have all been, in fact, transitioning to a new, amorphous world where gender isn’t rigid. In response to this change I think (no doubt subconsciously), expectant parents began staging “gender reveal” parties, as if to say, “My child will know exactly who he, or she, is,” which we know now may or may not be the case. And sure, as with any movement, some kids may declare themselves to be other than the gender their genitals indicate, but the truth is nothing about gender fluidity is new. For example, as a child ca. 1920, and for at least two years until she was 14, actress Katharine Hepburn insisted that the family call her “Jimmy,” and she wore boys’ clothes and had her hair cut short. Her family just went along, and why not? But there is a darker side to this, too, because her older brother Tom (who wasn’t “manly” enough, some biographers have suggested, for Hepburn’s father) committed suicide at age 16; young Kath found him hanging in a closet. As a family, the Hepburns never spoke of it again. And I can’t help thinking that while a daughter, still, can present as a tomboy, there is, still, no society space for a young boy to present as a girl for a while, try that out; let alone for either to transition.

What was troubling me about Sam’s transition had to do with a vague feeling, and I mean to be honest here, of repulsion toward the idea. Why? Why was I feeling this? Did I not quite believe him, suspect he was being exhibitionistic to be, say, a sensational social media influencer? It crossed my mind. But I don’t think he’s lying. The problem was with me, and I decided I had to understand—what I could easily accept in Mx. Viv, I struggled with in Sam, I realized, because Sam is someone I have actually known since he was a teenager. My internal conflict was much closer to what the parents and friends of trans youth might feel than I at first acknowledged. All this is really to do with gender as a societal construct, which (I see now), I’d had the good luck never to have to worry about.

The well-worn copy itself.

The first novel I read that centered gender is Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, which I decided to reread. Because I read with a pencil in hand, having conversations with my books, I see this must be my 6th reading of the full novel. (The only time I didn’t record impressions was in rereading it prior to studying in London in 2000, where I went three days ahead of classes so I might haunt Bloomsbury.) Each reading had a different purpose or at least caused me to come away with distinct, and distinctly limited, impressions. First, I was wowed by Woolf’s imagination—so different from that stultifying attempt to read To the Lighthouse in college; later, the more I learned about Woolf’s life, I was charmed by how her novel parodied her father’s profession as editor and writer of the Dictionary of National Biography in England. But more profoundly, Woolf’s novel was a deep reimagining of the life of her lover, for a brief period, and dear friend Vita Sackville-West. I’ve read the novel, then, over 30 years and with many discoveries, but this was the first time I read it with an intention: while I’d enjoyed the fantasy element of Orlando changing from a man to a woman over some 350 years, up the “present moment,” aged 36 in 1928, I had never thought about this gender change more than intellectually. Yes, we see what it’s like to be a woman vs. a man over time, and that somehow Orlando having had female lovers is still okay by the novel’s end, which is quite an achievement in modernism. But what am I missing?

The record of my rereadings. Do you do this?

Books become different because we become different readers, which is why rereading is so important. This particular revisiting was prompted by a movie. Back in the early winter I went to Film Forum here in New York to see Orlando: My Political Biography, a documentary in which several trans people were interviewed about their encounters with this novel, how it became their identity bible, how it helped them survive. Because I had no personal reason to connect with the novel on that level, I’d never read it that way (and these readers needed none of the backstory of Woolf and West to find the novel both revolutionary and comforting).

But now I had Sam and Mx. Viv (as well as my friend’s grandchild, now completing middle school as a boy); I’d seen the latest in a series of American horror stories, this the story of a nonbinary student in Oklahoma beaten to death in a high school restroom by (gender-assigned) girls, the student’s head smashed in over and over and over against the floor. Where does this hatred, this viciousness, come from? Where is all this fear coming from? Could reading Orlando again help me figure something out?

Woolf’s novel was (as Nigel Nicolson, the younger son of Vita Sackville-West, said) obviously a “love letter” to Virginia’s friend Vita, who when her father died learned she could not inherit the family estate Knole because she was a woman; so the famous estate went to her second cousin Edward (who had had nothing to do with the place unlike Vita, who’d loved and cared for it and kept it running all her life), who in turn sold it to the National Trust. Vita was bereft. In addition, Vita was bisexual, married to another bisexual, Harold Nicolson, and lived her life more or less as a man in her independence. Hers was quite a complicated life story in any era, but especially in 1928, when the book was published. Woolf’s novel was a spectacular best seller.

One might well ask, How did Woolf get away with it? In her infinite genius, she went full-on fantasy, beginning Orlando’s life back in time, when Queen Elizabeth I gifted Knole (fictionalized in the novel) to Thomas Sackville, Vita’s ancestor, and when Orlando (of the title) was a boy of 16. By taking Orlando through the ages—via the voice of a biographer-narrator who confesses to being as mystified as the reader at the changes, saying simply, “but that is what happened, what can I do”—Woolf subverts the gender transition though time transition. Readers are kept off balance through humorous descriptions of the awkwardness of the gender transition, exploring the mores and their differences for men and women through the ages. Orlando embraces, finally, her many selves, her genders, over all the centuries, coming to the present moment as a poet, a wife, a mother, a woman in the 20th Century.

The novel, as a note to those of you enticed (I hope) to read it, is not without ugliness—casual bigotry and acceptance of colonialism shockingly run throughout—which shows that no author, however enlightened in many areas, can be expected to be enlightened in all areas. But as Woolf’s biographer-narrator might say, “Difficult though this is, it’s what happened, and so we must record it.”

I must say, this journey of the past few years has been deeply affecting. I had never really thought about being a cisgender woman attracted to men since birth; I’ve had to ask myself if I was ever attracted to women, and yes, I have been—but only once I remember, as it happened oddly, suddenly, and then the feeling passed, in the audience of a theater maybe 15 years ago. I was in perimenopause at that time, I think, increasing in testosterone—was that it? Who knows? But it was real. Why did it hit me as something wrong? Why must anyone be tormented for having healthy sexual feelings, loving feelings, for our fellow beings; for wanting to express what is inside us in honest ways? Why do we continue to insist on gender reveals, coming outs? I used to wear dresses as well as pants; now I wear exclusively pants. I began dressing as a man, I guess, but with scarves and jewelry; and as a woman in America I can do this. Why can’t anyone of any gender simply discover and express themselves honestly?

“When this happened, Orlando heaved a sigh of relief, lit a cigarette, and puffed for a minute or two in silence. Then she called hesitatingly, as if the person she wanted might not be there, ‘Orlando?’ For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not— Heaven help us all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty-two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a person to say, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one’s name) meaning by that, Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”
~ Orlando, page 308 (HBJ edition)

Miss O’s Woolf shelf, partial view. Essays, letters, diaries, and especially her fiction: Virginia Woolf remains my favorite writer. Orlando, taped and glued together many times over, was my gateway.

And this is where I am in this moment, today, the 10th of March in the year 2024, writer, artist, editor, daughter, sister, friend, woman. What about you?

Love, in all its forms,

Miss O’