For the better part of the last twenty years, I’ve slipped from one year to the next, often drunkenly, usually at the bar up the street from my old house, always sequined, sweating off my mascara, standing in the dance floor with a bottle of champagne under a wing of balloons. The year passes in a holler of a second in which I wonder, like the overgrown adolescent I am, whether it would be nice […]
On average, I feel like I’m at least mildly losing my mind about once a day. The more acute freak-outs are maybe once a week these days, a real improvement from the early days when every morning felt like a siren. I don’t know if that means that things are any better—survey says they are, at least Covid-wise, they’re manifestly worse, but at least, I know that right now, for me, things are kind of […]
Recently I’ve been thinking about Richard the III, the play, not the historical character. Not so much for the political allegory (among other things our current, still-hopefully outgoing, overtly criminal tyrant-in-chief not only lacks the wit but the demented charm of the only great historical egomaniac/Shakespearean villain to have turned up buried under a Social Services parking lot, though I still holding out for more). Also I can’t imagine Donald Trump offering his kingdom for […]
So how’s everybody doing? I’m a bit rattled. I’ve been doing a lot of things that I shouldn’t—stress eating, stress drinking, stress shopping. I probably won’t surprise you to know that I’ve been handling our historic crisis (pandemic + election that may very well plunge my world into a level of sustained chaos that ranges from –depending on who you ask–a few burned out cars to, like, sustained battles in the streets) via over-consumption (although […]
A week ago Friday , about fifteen minutes after news broke of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, I was walking up and over the hill connecting my suburban neighborhood with the next one over where a friend lived. As a forty-something, flabby, puffy-eyed white woman with a four-pack of Guinness (medicinal, obvs) under an arm trying to navigate my way between streetlamps without using up the last 4% of battery life on my phone, I realized […]
My first election was November 1980. Carter/Reagan. My understanding, from a historical standpoint, was that it was an election in which a surprising lot of Baby Boomers, who all reputedly had grown their hair out just in time for 1968 and then spent most of the intervening twelve years experimenting with drugs, communes, cults, macramé, multi-level marketing and revolutionary violence (not necessarily in that order), suddenly discovered polo shirts and jumped ship because, I dunno, […]
I come from a long line of dangerous, complicated women. For generations back, they’ve defied expectation, edict, convention and commandment to go out into the world and be the women that they were, as opposed to the women they were supposed to be. They built businesses and communities. They took care. They took risks. They never lost sight of a world bigger than the one they were told to accept, and in so doing, they […]
I don’t remember when it started. All I know I woke up one Thursday morning in July? August? and found a bunch of workmen in crossing guard vests pulling up the peonies in my front yard. I dashed out in a disproportionate, apocalyptic-level panic, , because the peonies (a surprise when I bought the house) were this next level swoon of pink and white botanical tutus plopped down into the absolute dregs of spring 2020. […]
They say, at about 6am this morning, Gloria Maxine Mitchell Altizer Moran passed away peacefully in her sleep. Gloria Maxine Mitchell Altizer Moran. That’s twelve syllables, at least three lives and five epic novels (maybe six, “Maxine” alone is worthy of a twofer). I always thought I’d name my daughter Gloria after if I’d ever gotten around to having a daughter. But I never called her Gloria, not to her face anyway. I always, only […]
A couple eons, several millennia, four score and seven years, a hundred and sixty-odd days ago, when the world was new and we were all still so young and innocent, I ended my first full/real week of quarantine on a Facetime call with my best friend from her rooftop in Brooklyn. New York City was shutting down at end up day. My best friend had invited several people to join her on the rooftop for […]
