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How to be a Star

November 6, 2023 by mountainmornings

“Funny Girl” opened on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theatre in 1964. It closed the summer of 1967, after my Freshman year in college. Barbra Streisand was my ‘shero,’ playing Fanny Brice in a feminist Horatio Alger tale. I met Barbra one cold night, after her brilliant performance at the stage door; she graciously signed my Playbill.

I had just played Adelaide in my high school’s production of “Guys and Dolls.” The drama club was an all encompassing home for me; I could easily lose myself in a ditzy, loyal and yes, funny character. On opening night, the laughter and applause was addictive. My friend Bess, the editor of our senior yearbook, wrote something like, “…destined for Broadway” under my name.

After all, I grew up listening to show tunes and studying ballet. The Flapper loved Ethel Merman almost as much as I idolize Barbra. I would sing and dance in our front parlor like everyone was watching. But the sixties had other plans for Bess and me. We both went to Boston after graduating from Dover Senior High School, where our young dreams were derailed by a war, political assassinations, an illegal abortion and even a cult.

Although I never became a Broadway star, I followed Barbra’s meteoric rise to EGOT status. She had always dreamed of becoming famous, while my dreams were limited to summer camp. I remember feeling flummoxed to learn of her stage fright. How could she not love the limelight? Streisand’s iconic profile is currently on the cover of Vanity Fair, and she was interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning yesterday because she wrote her autobiography – “My Name is Barbra,” which will be released tomorrow. I just pre-ordered it!

Barbra wanted to set the record straight, and I want to find out what made her so ever-loving badass.

When I opened my BBC news tab this morning with coffee, one headline jumped out at me – “I haven’t had much fun in my life.” That Egyptian Queen profile wore a sardonic smile. And so I found out that a ME TOO moment onstage in her breakout hit “Funny Girl,” at the age of 22, was responsible for more than two decades of stage fright. Charlie Chaplin’s son Sydney, her leading man and almost 20 years her senior, had his sexual advances assaults rebuffed. He publicly became emotionally abusive, and tried to sabotage her performance every single night.

But like many women of our generation, she softened the story:

It’s just a person who had a crush on me – which was unusual – and when I said to him, ‘I don’t want to be involved with you’, he turned on me in such a way that was very cruel. He started muttering under his breath while I was talking on stage. Terrible words. Curse words. And he wouldn’t look into my eyes anymore. And you know, when you’re acting, it’s really important to look at the other person, and react to them.“

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-67283909

Maybe Chaplin did us a huge favor by propelling Streisand to Hollywood, where she now lives in Oprahland, among the lapsed Royalty of Harry and Meghan. Live theatre’s loss became the silver screen’s gain. She insisted on being in control of her life, on having creative control of her contracts. She gained a reputation as a difficult diva, but I never bought it. If she wanted to change a scene, she was probably right. Barbra became a director in order to maintain her control over a project. She wrote the script for 1983’s “Yentl” and wasn’t paid for it; she directed the movie and was paid minimum wage; and her acting fee was cut in half!

Mama can you hear me? I love Barbra even more now for not “fixing” her nose and rejecting Chaplin… for becoming one of my first feminist icons. But I’m not sure what to make of her Malibu basement stuffed with antiques and vintage dolls. Yes, dolls – Ibsen much? Still, she possessed a spark from a very young age, a need to become famous. And in her words, it was partially due to losing her father when she was a baby. “If you don’t have a source of unconditional love as a child, you will probably try to attain that for the rest of your life,” Barbra told the BBC.

I’d like to thank the Academy, and my foster parents for giving me the capacity to love unconditionally. Fame is fleeting, but stars can last for an eternity. Happy Birthday to the Pumpkin, our stellar 3rd grader!

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Being Afraid

October 31, 2023 by mountainmornings

It’s Halloween. Some people like going through haunted houses, dressing up with ghoulish makeup, and tricking you into handing out candy. Perfectly normal women become sexy French maids. Not me. I won’t watch horror movies or anything with zombies. In fact, I was watching a trailer with Ralph Fiennes in LA that caught me off guard – what appeared to be a cooking contest turned into something else entirely. I closed my eyes.

Did I say LA? Yes, Bob and I took a short, stealth trip out West to see the Rocker and Aunt Kiki. We flew in to see their finished home perched on a hill. It was so sweet to sit and talk, watch Cooper’s hawks gliding above us, and play backgammon. We didn’t Go Go GO! Instead, Bob taught them how to make pasta from scratch. I found myself looking around, at their beautiful home, at the amazing life they are building together in California, and catching my breath.

Kiki came home with her studio’s new coffee table book, so I immediately ordered mine. The living room on the cover is divinely inspired…. “Shamshiri: Interiors.” I’m lucky to have such an outstanding designer daughter on speed dial! Then we went for a seaview walk hike and I saw my first wild coyote.

The coyote is a medium-sized member of the dog family that includes wolves and foxes. With pointed ears, a slender muzzle, and a drooping bushy tail, the coyote often resembles a German shepherd or collie. Coyotes are usually a grayish brown with reddish tinges behind the ears and around the face but coloration can vary from a silver-gray to black. The tail usually has a black tip. Eyes are yellow, rather than brown like many domestic dogs. Most adults weigh between 25-35 pounds…”

https://urbancoyoteresearch.com/coyote-info/general-information-about-coyotes

It actually did look like a skinny wolf. I wasn’t afraid of the coyote, but I understood why my son’s cats must stay inside. They are predators and usually hunt rodents and rabbits, not people. You’re supposed to make a lot of noise if you see one, and indeed this guy looked at us, turned around and slowly sashayed away. I could picture his text bubble: “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

We’re back in Nashville and luckily I bought tons of candy before we left. Our new/old house is in a neighborhood of young families. I didn’t count last year, but I hope I don’t run out of treats tonight. There’s a skeleton waving from my front porch rocking chair and that’s the extent of my spooky decorating skills this year. After a week that’s seen another mass shooting in Maine of all places, and more and more anti-semitic rhetoric on social media I’m feeling enraged – but I guess that’s better than fear.

I will not let fear dictate my behavior.

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Quilting Pumpkins

October 23, 2023 by mountainmornings

It’s true, I’m just an old arts and crafts counselor at heart, who was masquerading as a boating and canoeing counselor at Camp St Joseph for Girls. Teaching water skiing by day, and knitting at night. Over the years I’ve tackled: crocheting Irish flowers; needlepointing fancy footstools; Celtic cable knitting; sewing pandemic masks; and quilting elephant crib toys. Those tiny grey elephants of differing shades and textures, suspended over a new baby’s crib, gave me the most pleasure. That is, until now.

The arts festival we bumped into on our glamping getaway is the reason my kitchen is doubling as a sewing room, again. The owner of a little shop had the cutest small, handsewn pumpkins I’d ever seen. If you’d rather have a real pumpkin slowly dying on your front porch read no further. Bob and I are finished carving pumpkins and roasting seeds. But if I were to decorate, and that’s always a big IF, for Halloween, I’d want something sustainable that can do double duty on Thanksgiving. So I paid attention when instructions were given on how to quilt patchwork pumpkins, and then I heard,

“You can always look it up on Pinterest, DIY Fat Quarter Pumpkins!”

What the heck are fat quarters? Well a fat quarter is a piece of fabric cut crosswise from a 1⁄2-yard piece of fabric – ie an 18×44″ rectangle cut in half to yield an 18×22″ “fat” 1⁄4-yard piece. And it just so happens the store had bunches of ‘fat quarters’ already cut in lots of fall colors and patterns ready to sell. Surprise. My next grandparenting craft activity, after mosaic birdbaths, was set! I hauled out the ironing board and iron and started cutting out cardboard ellipses as pumpkin templates.

It just so happens that the war in Israel and Gaza has been escalating in tandem with my pumpkin project. The Grands finished their pumpkins in a day last weekend, but then I couldn’t stop. In the middle of a brutal conflict half a world away, I’ve found some comfort in keeping my hands busy, in making something beautiful despite growing despair. Bob reminds me that I have no control over the Mideast; I remind myself that I do have control over needle and thread.

I walk through the Fall garden, still trying valiantly to hang on. The sage and rosemary are bountiful while the tarragon begins to wither. This is my favorite time of year – a time to think about new beginnings, for harvesting, a birthday season for my family. The unbearable heat of a southern summer is gone. This is the time of year to witness squirrels collecting nuts and cardinals standing out like sentries in trees.

Thankfully my Parnassus book arrived in the mail – “The Comfort of Crows: a Backyard Year,” by Margaret Renkl. Her words about nature, about the flora and fauna in her own backyard, are a balm. Her stories soothe me into sleep.

As we move through the seasons—from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year—what develops is a portrait of joy and grief. Joy at the ongoing pleasures of the natural world: “Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will always find a reason to love the world.” And grief at a shifting climate, at winters that end too soon, at songbirds growing fewer and fewer.” 

https://www.parnassusbooks.net/comfortofcrows

And the universal grief of war. I have to believe, to hope that peace is attainable. So I’ll continue to quilt as a meditation.

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Ring of Fire

October 16, 2023 by mountainmornings

The war invades my thoughts. It seeps into my dreams.

A friend from the midwest asked what I thought of the war because I am the only Jew she knows. I said, “And I’m an Irish one at that!” I try not to watch the images, still I can see the brutality in my mind. Dancing with the Torah at night, dragged out of your ‘safe’ room in the morning and loaded onto a truck. Grandparents, babies, and children, sisters and brothers all herded into Gaza.

Did you know that fourteen of the 199 hostages are citizens of Thailand? They are not just Israeli citizens, some are also Americans, Italians, and Germans. I wonder how you negotiate with Hamas; do you trade Israeli soldiers for Palestinian prisoners?

Israel has a well-proven expertise in hostage rescue, which it trains for intensively. Set up in 1957, its secretive Sayeret Matkal unit is broadly similar to Britain’s SAS or America’s Delta Force. It shot to fame in 1976 with its Raid on Entebbe where its commandos rescued hostages from a hijacked plane at a Ugandan airport. The commander of that unit was Yonatan Netanyahu, the only fatality amongst the Israeli commandos. Today his brother Benjamin is Israel’s Prime Minister and it is with him that the decision rests as to whether to wait it out in the hopes of a negotiated release of the hostages or go in hard in the hopes of rescuing them by force.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67084408

On Friday night, a week after the attack, we gathered at home around a live stream Sabbath Service from the synagogue. We listened to the Rabbi grapple with grief. In the Torah portion, we went back to the beginning, to the Creation story – a tale of the forbidden fruit. But what if the apple wasn’t a test? What if we were given free will, and the test is yet to come?

In other news, I’ve been sewing quilted pumpkins to keep my hands busy. Bob and the real Pumpkin – who wants to be Einstein for Halloween – made a pin-hole box in order to view the partial eclipse safely. It transformed the ring of fire into a small white ellipse on cardboard! And the Bug is starting to look like a California skater girl.

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Sunrise

October 11, 2023 by mountainmornings

I was going to write about our glamping getaway with friends to Wildwood. But then I thought I’d have to start off before our Granville, TN jaunt, with our trip to the Emergency Department of the Bride’s hospital. And then Hamas attacked Israel.

At sunrise on Saturday the war began. The terrorists entered the country by land, sea and motorized paragliders – launching over 2,000 rockets and overwhelming Israel’s Iron Dome defenses. The descendants of Abraham are caught once again in a biblical battle and my heart aches for all the innocent Jewish and Arab citizens who are caught in the middle.

But make no mistake, their hatred runs deep.

Before glamping with friends last week, our whole southern family met up with my step-brother Eric at the Land Between the Lakes in Kentucky. If you recall, the Flapper married Eric’s father, her third husband Mr B, when I was in middle school. He was a distinguished judge in town, and he and Bob’s father shared the honor of being first and second presidents of the Dover Jewish Center Brotherhood.

Eric and I have been wanting our Grands to get together forever; he has three granddaughters living close by in St Louis, about the same age as our Bug and Pumpkin. Eric spoke fluent Hebrew and worked on a Kibbutz after college. When Vietnam happened he was drafted, and because he is a pacifist, he served as a med-evac Huey pilot. He introduced me to Arlo Guthrie and the fine art of passive resistance.

I was looking forward to hearing his thoughts on the politics of Israel today, on the extreme Orthodoxy that would like to turn Israel into a theocracy like Iran… before Saturday.

Many years ago I was visiting Eric and his wife Bev with the Flapper for their daughter’s Bat Mitzvah. He’d been a practicing dentist for over 30 years at that time. We were sitting in their living room with friends of theirs from Israel, one a young lawyer and judge who I’ll call Anat. I’d been complaining about Newark airport, about an Army soldier being searched before boarding our plane. It was the early 90s, long before TSA. And Anat said,

“You don’t think they would dress like a soldier?”

No, I hadn’t thought of that. Just like I didn’t think a plane hijacking meant a suicide mission. But her eyes changed, her posture changed, her essence changed before my eyes – Anat became a soldier. And so I immediately thought of Anat’s beautiful family in Ramat HaSharon, Israel on Saturday. I texted Bev to see if they were OK, and for now they are safe. I checked her facebook page but it was all in Hebrew, nothing past mid-September when the Holy Days began.

They should have been celebrating the end of Sukkot, a Jewish Thanksgiving and more. Last Saturday marked the end of reading the Torah in synagogues everywhere, and opening the book again to the first of the Five Books of Moses. It is a joyous time. Instead they are under attack from an enemy that wants to annihilate OUR people, the Jewish people. Their hatred runs deep. The British tried to draw boundaries on an area of nomadic tribes with fluid borders. But since shortly after the Holocaust, since 1948, Israel has been a sovereign state, a democracy, the size of New Jersey, surrounded by Arab states.

Make no mistake. Israelis do not slaughter Olympic athletes, or fly jets into buildings. They don’t strap bombs on themselves and walk into markets or behead journalists and children to post on Facebook live. Hamas must be stopped.

The sun is rising on part of my family in California – can you tell who is Jewish?

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Pet Peeves

September 27, 2023 by mountainmornings

Are dog and cat people like the musical Oklahoma; its farmers and cowboys, never to reconcile? If I had my way, we would have always had dogs and cats. In fact we did for awhile in the Berkshires with our first German Shepherd dog “Bones” and my old red tabby cat “Henry”. That is, until the toddler Bride proved to be highly allergic to cats – and that was that! Turns out Bob is also allergic to felines, only we didn’t find out until we cared for the Rocker and Kiki’s cat “Pou” (pronounced like NO) while they moved to California.

I’m asking about pets because I just read that President Biden’s two year old dog “Commander,” a beautiful German Shepherd, has bitten yet another Secret Service agent. I looked at Bob and said he’s probably a secret MAGAT, dogs KNOW THESE THINGS!

The attack happened on Monday night and the officer was treated at the scene, the Secret Service said in a statement on Tuesday. This is the 11th time the dog has bitten a guard at the White House or the Biden family home.The White House press secretary has previously blamed the attacks on the stress of living at the White House.“

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66932087

But eleven times? We can blame a lot of things on stress: psoriasis, anxiety, insomnia, to name a few. But how stressful can it be for a dog living the good life at the White House? Granted, the Bidens had to foster their other German Shepherd rescue “Major” with friends after moving to DC. Still, in all our history of family dogs – Bones, Tootsie Roll, Blaze, Buddha, and Bean – we have never had a biting incident. Never. IF I had a dog that bit a person, it would go back to the shelter.

Don’t get me wrong, our dogs were brave, cold-hearted killers. Squirrels mostly with an occasional rabbit. Ms Bean could catch a bird mid-flight! Still, most of my past injuries have been dog-related. Starting with big baby Buddha, who didn’t yet know his own size and side-bumped me across our patio while running out of the rain into the house. And ending this year with our funny fast Frenchie finger kerfluffle. Of course cats can be dangerous too, just ask my brother Dr Jim. His black and white tuxedo cat “L’il Bit” actually sent him to the hospital with sepsis. Twice!

If I had to choose between a dog or a cat, I guess I’m a dog person. I’ve always had dogs, mostly mutts. Our little rescue dog Ms Bean passed away this summer at 16 years old. I’ve had trouble trying to write about it. She was so sweet, even though she came with phobias and hip dysplasia. She was our special needs puppy who navigated both the Albemarle country and Nashville city life with ease. She was my last dog, even though Bob isn’t ready to throw in the towel. Like the Queen, I know when my old age will no longer align with a puppy’s friskiness.

We all know which President didn’t have a pet in the White House in the last 100 years right? The only one? Not a dog or a cat or even a lizard? Let’s do our best to keep dogs on the Hill, even if they nip now and then.

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Chi Whiz

September 19, 2023 by mountainmornings

Fall is in the air and birthday celebrations are mostly behind us. The Love Bug, my sister Kay and both daughters (Nashville and Cali) are Virgo babies, aka Christmas party babies. I can’t tell you if a planet is in retrograde, but I do enjoy reading a daily or monthly horoscope from time to time. It started after 9/11 when I was working with the high school librarian – she would always arrange all the newspapers on a wooden rack every morning. But first, we’d read our horoscopes!

Happy birthday season to you, Virgo! The Sun is in your sign until September 23, filling you with brilliant ideas and a yearning to explore fresh terrain. Scratch that itch…and the next one. While your sign is known for putting others first, this is the time to prioritize your own needs and plans so you can set up the next 12 months to flow in the direction you desire.” 

https://www.elle.com/horoscopes/monthly/a78/virgo-monthly-horoscope/

No one knows how to prioritize their own needs like a teenager; and lo and behold our Bug is well on her way to becoming a glorious teen. For her birthday she asked us for a new duvet and hanging shelves because she’s redecorating her bedroom! We hit the mall last week shopping for her friend’s birthday at Sephora, which if you don’t already know is where every tween and teen shops for skin care. Yes, I said skin care. My first thought about my “skin care” routine happened in college. So, late teens and no pimples thankfully.

The only thing available then was Clinique, and I refused to give up using a bar of soap. Why buy a “cleanser?” But moisturizer became a must-have, quickly followed by sun protection. The Bride recently turned me onto the Ordinary which is like dermatologist-grade-serum, only generic and sold at Target. I’m still using soap, Dove for sensitive skin, and a combo of LaRoche-Posay anti-aging primer with 50 SPF sunscreen and CeraVe ultra-light moisturizer 30 SPF.

Hot Button Issue: I am certainly NOT anti-aging; in fact I’m PRO-aging! The whole beauty industry or wellness/health/goop people need to stop using “anti-aging” in their marketing. My generation burned their bras and stopped teasing their hair. We gave up girdles for God’s sake. We are embracing our laugh lines and electing not to have plastic surgery or even fillers!! The Flapper was all about hair and nails but not me.

My face is the least of my worries – my bone density has star billing at the moment.

Which is why I wasn’t allowed to move any of our furniture back into the dining/sitting room after Bob finished installing the wood floors. Lifting heavy objects is a definite NO with an osteoporosis diagnosis. But I was happy to take a cue from my granddaughter and supervise rearranging everything for maximum CHI! Also, I never miss an opportunity for a little Swedish Death Cleaning!

“There’s been a shift in the consciousness of people 70 and over,” said Ann Lightfoot, author of the forthcoming book, “Love Your Home Again.” “They’re like, ‘Oh my God, nobody wants my stuff. I don’t even want my stuff.’ Professionals often refer to the task as “death cleaning,” a term popularized in 2018 with the publication of the book, “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning,” by Margareta Magnusson.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/realestate/how-to-discover-the-life-affirming-comforts-of-death-cleaning.html

And since I wanted the Chi – vital life force or energy – to flow freely again after all that cleaning and reorganizing, we moved the dining table to the other side of the room in front of 3 windows and set Buddha on the vintage French Cupboard facing East for maximum feng shui. Now I walk into the front room and smile. The morning sun sweeps over our table and the room looks much bigger.

As I begin to close in on the fourth quarter of my ‘one and only’ century on this earth, I’m beginning to appreciate a less is more aesthetic. Or maybe Bob is rubbing off on me? Wait, my daughter just walked in with a few things she thought we might want… I asked her if she wants a needlepoint I did in 1979 of a clown with her birth data inscribed in balloons… 7 lbs and 3.5 oz. And here is our Bug finishing up her mosaic bird bath.

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Grief Descending

September 11, 2023 by mountainmornings

I’m always caught by surprise

A Fall morning blue and crisp, with

Change in the air, suddenly I Look Up.

It was a day like any other that

Became a day like nothing we could ever imagine

Everything slowed into soft focus…

My children, where were my children?

My neighbor wandering aimlessly on our street

My husband waiting by the dock for bodies

Waiting,,

Should I give blood, what can I do?

How could 22 years have passed by

And every year that beautiful, cloudless sky

Descends, demands that I pay attention

That we say their names, that I say his name

Michael Patrick Tucker

Buena Vista Avenue, Rumson

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Milestones

September 5, 2023 by mountainmornings

For the first time ever last week, Facebook sent me a warning. Granted, I wasn’t suspended, only put in detention with a “restriction.” Why?

Because I posted a WAPO article about police stopping cars in a TX county if they think women are going to cross borders to obtain an abortion. You read that right. Passing an ordinance legislators call “abortion trafficking” is the latest ploy of religious zealots designed to frighten women into submission. Here’s what I said with the link:

“If this sounds like a dystopian novel, it’s not. It’s real. Pro or anti-choice this is not what democracy looks like.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/01/texas-abortion-highways/

And Facebook didn’t like it: “Some of your content in the last year didn’t follow our Community Standards.”

Maybe I should feel honored? I wonder exactly what word triggered their algorithm – dystopian? Because watching TN legislators pass laws about decorum in front of Covenant families asking for a modicum of gun safety legislation, while celebrating the Love Bug’s birthday with a gaggle of tweens at a Barbie movie felt pretty Orwellian!

Republicans aside, Bob is in the middle of tearing up our house. Staining a fence wasn’t enough in his ongoing quest to upgrade this old cottage core house. We had wanted to save the original pine floors in my snug and the main living/dining area, only to find out later they weren’t really salvageable. We all know if someone were to drop dead on the street in front of him, Bob could save a life. He can also sew up a laceration like a plastic surgeon. What I pleaded with him NOT to do was lay the new engineered hardwood himself.

But thanks to the wonders of YouTube, my husband has turned into a floor guy; along with the fence guy and fine woodworking guy, and the all around Mr Fixit guy. On the one hand, he’s happy learning to do something new. On the other hand, my house is almost always a construction zone. In the past, like 30 years ago, he laid tile in our kitchen. But that was fun, sort of, and we were young, definitely. Now, he’s busy introducing his grandson, the Pumpkin, to power tools.

I find myself lost in memories of wood burning stoves and diapers hanging on a clothesline. Milestones included buying our first house and bringing the newborn Bride home. Her first tooth was miraculous. She started walking on our orange shag carpet. My first published essay was about black ice in the Berkshire Eagle. Then the Rocker was born and he lit up our house like a perpetual motion machine. How could I know that sometime in the future I’d be censored by a large, strange social media corporation?

I read last night that the First Lady has Covid. I wish her well and hope that Joe is staying isolated. After all, if his polls are still running even with a twice impeached, ex-president facing a charge of insurrection who is too afraid to even debate his challengers, well then the next milestone may be just as incomprehensible.

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Early Bird Voting

August 29, 2023 by mountainmornings

Naturally, the Nashville mayor’s race had to have a runoff. So instead of jumping into the pool for morning aquatics, followed by sitting down at my desk to write, Bob and I jumped into the car and drove to a swanky neighborhood for early voting. There were also many councillors on the ticket and we could choose four, except my little red, plastic coffee stir-stick would not work on one of them. I must have ‘tapped’ the name Burkley Allen ten times before it registered.

I alerted one of the election people afterwards because of course my mind thought ‘conspiracy.’ Every other councilor’s name popped right up as soon as my stick hit their box. Bob said he’s always used his finger on the monitor, it’s much easier and better for the environment. The red stick was simply a Covid precaution…VOTE FREDDIE for MAYOR!

I hate that my mind thinks of subterfuge first – that my trust in so many things has been slowly eroding. We trust our children to make the right choice, it’s the only way we can let them go into adulthood. We trust our mail to end up in our mailbox, how else would we know what’s on sale at Costco? But post-Mr T and January 6, I’ve felt a shift in my trusting neurons. Why is T’s name front page news still? Why did TN legislators pass a bill on decorum first, and remove grieving Covenant moms with signs from the gallery? After this special session on public safety, and the latest school shooting in NC, I’ve lost whatever faith I had left after Sandy Hook.

TN was the last state to cast the vote for women’s suffrage. It will most likely be the last to vote for any kind of law restricting guns.

In the good news column, our little Love Bug celebrated her birthday this past weekend. She and her friends went to the Barbie movie, they painted their nails like tweens do. And we had a discussion about cellphones at the family dinner table. Many of her friends have phones, tablets and/or iPhone watches… she doesn’t. It’s her parents’ decision of course. But she told me she’s glad not be on “text chains”that run into the night, instead she gets to sleep through the night. Her friends are always tired – FOMO does not seem to affect her, thank goodness.

When I was young, we only had gossip to contend with; like so and so said that so and so did this! And I was the kind of kid that went right to the horse’s mouth and called them out. Spreading rumors wasn’t called bullying back then, it was called gossiping. We didn’t need to fear that our words, or even our pictures, could be seen by millions of strangers and could linger for years in the virtual cess-pool of a world wide web. Here is an example of how we are all on our own when it comes to cyber-bullying. Two sisters had to track down their stalker themselves.

Technology has raced ahead in the 10 years since Madison’s photos first appeared online, and artificial intelligence combined with social media has made it even easier for abusers to distribute intimate images on the internet without consent. But legislation to protect victims still falls short. Most of the 48 states and the District of Columbia that have laws prohibiting the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images, many passed in the past decade, require that victims prove that the distributors of their photos intended to harm them.“

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/08/26/revenge-porn-leaked-nudes-police/

HELLO?! I can only hope our laws will evolve to meet our basic humanity. My only wish is that people who are sworn to obey the constitution, will see through the fog of decorum in every state house, and a person’s intent to do no harm.

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