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Posts Tagged ‘Shakespeare’

Well…

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, Memoir, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 2, 2020| Leave a Comment »

As you already know, the Fourth holds some significance in my family’s life. In 1949, our Year of Living Dangerously, my Father died from a brain tumor in April. The Flapper decided she needed to take a small road trip on the Fourth of July weekend that year, so she piled everyone in the car. Everyone except my brother Michael, who wanted to stay home. He was eleven years old and had a basketball game.

We were driving outside the city of Scranton to see the new airport in Wilkes Barre, PA. A drunk driver hit us head on. My Nana was holding me in the back seat, I was 10 months old, there were no child seats.

Every Fourth is a mountain for me to climb; and this year is no different. I approach the holiday with some semblance of respect. Don’t get me wrong – I love our flag, the parades, and barbeque. But I’d just as soon not get in a car.

My siblings all had different ways of coping.

Mike, the one who wasn’t in the car, threw an amazing 4th of July party with his wife Jorja every year on Lake Minnetonka in MN. He called it “the good life” and my sister Kay would fly in from NY to be with the Flapper. After all, 14 year old Kay was in a coma for a month in 1949. My brother, seven year old Dr Jim, got to ride in a fire engine after the accident. He later moved his family from California to the Land of a Thousand Lakes.

I was the only one missing. I was the one sent to a foster family, and I started my own family in New England.

The Fourth of July parade was our introduction to Pittsfield, MA. Bob was interviewing for a job as an ER doctor, and I was enchanted with the Berkshires. We sat on Edith Wharton’s lawn to watch A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We got tickets to Jacob’s Pillow and I remembered what it meant to dance. We had the Bride in 1979, while we were living on the side of a mountain with a spring-fed pond.

The Rocker was born midsummer, at the edge of a bird sanctuary. I was writing for the Berkshire Eagle, and I didn’t need to travel for the Fourth. We were content to stay home. Bob always said emergency departments are at their busiest on this holiday.

This year fireworks are cancelled in Nashville. No parade. Our city is taking a step back because the coronavirus infection rates are rising. And bars are closed, which is a good thing.

But love isn’t canceled. Patriotism isn’t cancelled. I still love this country, despite the last three years. Happy Birthday USA! Yes our founders were slave holders and scoundrels, but they did do some things right.

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How Came We Ashore?

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, criminal justice, Memoir, Public Policy, tagged , , , , , on September 10, 2019| Leave a Comment »

In the depths of a crisis, have you ever looked around and asked yourself how in the world you got there? How did Great Grandma Ada, a Jewish girl from Brooklyn, end up in Nashville for instance. I am less likely to examine the minutiae of my circumstances, maybe because I was tossed about from one home to another as a child. I had to learn to ride the waves of two families. Plus, I’m not one to live in the past; but I do love to see Shakespeare performed outside, amidst the sounds of birds and trains.

This past weekend our whole family bumped into “The Tempest” outside our restaurant window! We loved it so much, we came back the next day with lawn chairs. A deposed Duke Prospero, has been tossed onto an island in a storm with only his young daughter, Miranda, some sprites of course, and a strange, savage man named Caliban. So what does he do? He whips up an even bigger storm with his magic to payback his conniving brother and his court who are now shipwrecked alongside him.

Shenanigans begin!

When Bob and I first married and moved to the Berkshires, we would regularly attend Shakespeare at the Mount in Lenox. Edith Wharton’s “cottage” garden was the setting for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” our introduction to the Bard en plein air. Of course we became enamored of this comedy of errors, where sprites and fairies rule the roost and make mockery of love and lust. Puck is a most mischievous servant and of course magic plays a central role in this play as well.

Leaping ahead from the 17th Century to today, I wonder who will be the ultimate playwright of our turbulent times? We may not have dukes and kings and queens but we do have a president who would be king. He loves opulence and the fame reality TV brings, he yearns for power and adoring crowds of red-hatted people. Kim Kardashian-West seems to be the only person who has played him recently, successfully lobbying Mr T to enact the first criminal justice reform bill in recent history.

Now Kim, a perfect medieval sprite, is studying Law – and what does Shakespeare say about lawyers? And not the one about killing all of them:

I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician’s, which is fantastical; nor the courtier’s, which is proud; not the soldier’s which is ambitious; nor the lawyer’s, which is politic; nor the lady’s, which is nice; nor the lover’s, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness.

Yes, lawyers can be political. Think about Gloria Allred’s daughter, the feminist lawyer, Lisa Bloom. She’s found herself in a bit of a Tempest while arguing FOR Harvey Weinstein in a memo she suggested they sully an actress’ reputation. Paint Rose McGowan to be unhinged, a “harpy” in Shakespearian terms. I’m heading over to Parnassus soon to get the new book, “She Said” by Jody Kantor and Megan Twohey. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/08/books/review/she-said-jodi-kantor-megan-twohey.html

Maybe this is how we can frame our troubled times. Pulitzer Prize winning journalists piece together the culture of abuse and obfuscation that dominates some of our most cherished institutions. And instead of a play, we will make a film. How did we end up caging children, separating families, and drawing Alabama into Hurricane Dorian with a Sharpie? How have we managed to separate ourselves from the natural world and our allies on this forlorn island?

Magically, we landed on a lawn in a park in the city to help ease our “humorous sadness.”

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Just a Little Misunderstanding

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 6, 2018| Leave a Comment »

We picked up the L’il Pumpkin at school mid-morning. It was going to be a fun day, going to the Children’s Theatre to see The Little Mermaid, then lunch and on to Hannukah. But we had a long holding session in the lobby before the play with a few other schools, so I headed over to the large center table covered with paper, crayons and writing prompts.

“Ariel and her father the King are having trouble understanding each other. What do you wish adults could understand better about children?”

“What do you think,” I asked my little grandson.

“Listening,” he said without missing a beat.

And a light went off; I thought about the term “active listening,” like some ancient artifact that had washed ashore in my brain, back before parenthood. While studying child psychology, I knew even before reading a text that some people are checked out when it comes to their kids, and some are just naturally checked IN.

This was long before we had tiny smart phones to ding and buzz our attention away from our children. Just as we need context to read and comprehend, we need to hear between the lines in order to communicate well with little people. Sure meltdowns can happen, but if we are paying attention, we can usually avoid them.

I was recently involved in a conversation with one of Great Grandma Ada’s friends. He had been a professor at Vanderbilt in his youth, now well into his 90s he liked to paint beautiful, vivid landscapes. I was aware of how effortlessly we spoke, and it’s hard to remember what exactly we spoke about, but it started with Brexit. The rare thing of beauty was that here was a man who was listening – he wasn’t turning his head away, or nodding, or looking at his watch. He was engaging, and our words flew elegantly back and forth.

You don’t have to be a Disney princess to get into hot water with your parents. The L’il Pumpkin told me he was glad Ariel smashed the magic shell containing her voice, thereby breaking the sea witch Ursula’s spell. I thought about the many voiceless women, throughout his/herstory, who were destined to live a constrained life; tied up in apron strings, never learning to drive a car (like Nelly, my foster mother), living in a “Doll’s House” like Nora herself, or Shakespeare’s Rosalind before her.

I hope our grandson grows up to be a good listener, to be a mensch. Watching him skip back to our car, holding Bob’s hand in the parking lot, my heart melted a little.

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Vulgar Vice Mayor?

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , on December 1, 2016| 4 Comments »

Beware what you put out there on social media. Through my jet lag fog I witnessed a battle royal last night on Facebook, one my sweet LA niece had no reason to be embroiled in, and I thought how a Shakespearian tragedy can unfold in real time with absolutely no effort. This semantic sparring had something to do, well everything really, with our President Elect (who shall forever be named Mr T to me). Just as our local political news is indirectly related to a newly discovered free/for/all/climate of intimidation and fear in the wake of last month’s election.

A young Black man, an activist who moved to Cville about the same time we did, is being vilified in the local press over some Twitter comments he made years ago. Wes Bellamy was a high school history teacher and the Vice Mayor of the Cville City Council – two positions I just learned he either voluntarily left or was asked to leave yesterday. I first met him at the Paramount when he was introducing a petition to remove General Robert E Lee’s statue from Lee Park. It was before the Confederate Flag issue had raised its ugly head in parts of the South. He struck me as sincere, and fired up about social justice.

But because a local blogger found a few 8 year old Tweets where Bellamy said some repugnant things, statements others have concluded were racist and sexist including, wait for it, “…beanpole body white women in these sundresses”…thank you for that sir since my beanpole days are far behind me, Bellamy issued this apology on Facebook:

“In the course of trying to mature and find my way I came to some false conclusions about the world around me and made them known,” Bellamy wrote. “Since then, I’ve furthered my education and gotten married. I’m raising daughters. I have and continue to strive to be a better man, community leader, educator, public servant and overall person. I work every day to become a better version of myself.” 

What surprises me is that Mr T has gotten away with saying and Twittering much worse. But I guess this is what male White privilege is all about. Cville Weekly calls our attention to an Albemarle County Supervisor, Chris Dumler, who was accused of raping a woman and continued to do his job while in jail and he had no intention of leaving his position! I was always loathe to use the term ” high tech lynching for uppity Blacks,” a la Clarence Thomas for you young’uns, but in this case it would actually seem to fit the bill. http://www.c-ville.com/tweetstorm-bellamy-apologizes-inappropriate-posts/#.WEBfjRRaHlI

So in the spirit of the season let me call your attention to an article my friend’s son ironically posted on Facebook from the NY Times, an essay on why social media may not just be an uncivilized wasteland and vortex of your precious time, but may also be detrimental to your overall health and career:  “There are many issues with social media, from its corrosion of civic life to its cultural shallowness, but the argument I want to make here is more pragmatic: You should quit social media because it can hurt your career.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/jobs/quit-social-media-your-career-may-depend-on-it.html?mwrsm=Facebook&_r=0

As my dear late Sister-in-Law Anita would say, this is all “STUPID!” She had a way of seeing through the fog of problems, and getting directly to a point. She would tell our lovely niece to cut all ties with people who hate people and spread nasty comments all over her Facebook feed. I’ve lost a few friends and family myself this past year, and I’m honored to be in her company.

“To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man” or woman.  the Bard   This is the long view from our LA AirBnB. img_5664

 

 

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My Wheelhouse

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , on November 21, 2013| 2 Comments »

Continuing in the Throwback Thursday vein, I’ve come up with a “selfie” from 1975. CLR Hippie Chick 20131120 WebOf course I didn’t take the photo, and don’t remember who did. Except that it was a photographer who stopped me on Madison Avenue near my sister’s NYC apartment with that age-old ruse about making me a star.  I told him he could take my picture, but gave him the Flapper’s address because I didn’t buy into his nonsense. Not wanting to be the next Ms Goodbar, I forgot about it until the picture appeared in my Mother’s inbox mailbox.

At the time I was putting my Psychology degree to good use.                                                                                            http://www.silive.com/news/index.ssf/2010/05/willowbrook_survivors_recollec_1.html

Because of my future employer’s investigative reporting, most of the psychiatric hospitals, previously known as “State Lunatic Asylums” were closing down. The overcrowded, inhuman conditions, coupled with advances in drugs like Thorazine marked the 70s trend toward de-institutionalization. The question remained, what should we do with these patients who were returning to society, sometimes after decades of neglect? The answer was a different type of warehousing, “day treatment facilities.”

I was hired to drive a bus and pick up patients from their group homes, delivering them to a bevy of activities in the state of NJ. I also got to run a few of the group therapy sessions, and since I enjoyed gardening, my supervisor encouraged me to plant a garden of vegetables around the back patio with like-minded patients. Passivity was a continuing problem, either due to the psychotropic drugs they were taking or the years spent behind hospital bars, or both. So actually digging in the dirt was considered a milestone.

Today, many people with severe disabilities are able to live a normal life. Modern pharmaceuticals allow them to work, to drive, to love, and to make a home for themselves. But sometimes psychotic patients stop taking their meds, for various reasons and when that happens, when they become a threat, “to themselves or others,” it’s time for a reboot which includes a short hospital stay. And when those psych beds, which may be on a floor of any hospital in your neighborhood, are full, when a doctor can’t find one bed for his or her patient, well then sometimes that patient falls through a crack. Over the years, Bob has had to discharge too many severely ill psych patients because there were no beds available.

964831-creigh-deeds-and-familyMy prayers go out to VA Sen Creigh Deeds who was stabbed by his own son, Gus, on Tuesday after being released from a hospital in Bath County on Monday. Gus Deeds later turned a gun on himself in a continuation of this Shakespearian tragedy now called a “murder suicide.” And we can’t blame the lack of will to pass gun control legislation after VA Tech, or the shortage of mental health beds in the state alone, because blame can be shared by a tightening of budgets over the past few years that was reported by the  National Alliance on Mental Illness: “Virginia’s overall state mental-health budget decreased $37.7 million dollars from $424.3 million to $386.6 million between fiscal years 2009 and 2012.”  The wheels on this bus cannot continue going round and round. If a state senator’s son could not access help, what does that mean for the rest of us?

 In 2011, Virginia inspector general G. Douglas Bevelacqua released a report chastising the state for turning away in a month an estimated 200 patients determined to be a threat to themselves or others who met the criteria for a temporary detention, only because state facilities lacked the room to hold them. Twenty-three of Virginia’s 40 community-services boards acknowledged that “streeting” occurred at their facilities.

Read more: Virginia State Senator Creigh Deeds’ Son Evaluated and Released Before Stabbing | TIME.com http://nation.time.com/2013/11/19/before-senators-stabbing-a-shortage-of-psychiatric-beds/#ixzz2lI6Mmsqu

 

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