There was no Facebook or Instagram in 1970. I sent a postcard to Brandeis with my preferences: neat, non-smoker. Over the summer I received one back: Carol from Brooklyn. She received a similar one with my name and address. I later learned that she thought I would arrive in over-alls (the East Coast kids called them dungarees) with hay in my hair because I come from Huntington Woods. She didn’t understand that I lived in an affluent tiny town about two miles northwest of Detroit. Huntington Woods has no schools so we were educated in Royal Oak, at the time the seventh largest city in Michigan. No hayseed here.

From her yearbook photo (which was submitted for “New Faces”, the Freshman yearbook; the guys called it the “Pig Book” – let’s talk about the need for attitude readjustments!) one can tell she was good looking, but by the time she showed up, she had cut her hair into a chic shag and adopted the hipster uniform of the day: plaid shirt, jeans and work boots, along with dangling earrings. I didn’t have pierced ears. She had a boyfriend from back home and whenever he visited, I had to find a different place to sleep. She was a Psych major. I, a Theatre Arts major. We were very different, but at first, tried to find common ground.

We were both neat and non-smokers and that was a blessing. We attracted boys to our room like bees to flowers. I later learned that one wag had given us the  “TPR” award…that is: “Tits Per Room”! We had different taste in room decor. She opted for psychedelic wall art; I was into Renoir’s “Bather” from the Detroit Institute of Art and, after one break, came back with a poster of a handsome WWII flyer (my father, a photo blown up by my cousin). The girls on my floor thought the unidentified man must be some 1940s movie star. I rather liked that.

We took the train into Cambridge to shop once, early in the school year. I bought her earrings for her October birthday at Truc in Harvard Square. We did try to be friends, but were too dissimilar. She hung out with “cool” kids, some of whom mocked me behind my back (I discovered notes in her waste basket).

We had similar taste in music. That was a solid bond. Elton John’s first album played non-stop for a while during study time. She had a much better stereo system than I did and she let me play her records. I appreciated that.

She slept nude. I thought that was pretty cool, so I started to as well. She broke up with the guy back home and started dating guys on campus, often coming in very late at night, having screaming fights while I was trying to sleep. I stayed out of those.

She talked in her sleep twice. By second semester, she had arranged her schedule to have no early classes. I still had 9am classes most days, so was up at 8am every day. A dear friend had given me an old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock with a tiny hammer dinging two bells on top. It could rouse anyone out of a stupor and Carol hated it. One morning it went off, she sat up straight in bed and said, “Who do the think you are, the fucking ice cream man?” Another morning, out of the blue, she sat up and said, “Hello, goodbye, no exit”. She was reading Sartre. She claimed in both cases that she was sound asleep and had no memory of either event. I thought both were quite funny. Perhaps she was having acid flash-backs.

At some point during first semester, she decided it was time that I try pot, so got a group of girls from our dorm together, we all sat in a circle on the floor of our room and passed a joint. Much to her chagrin, I felt nothing. We mostly went our separate ways.

In the waning weeks of the school year, we finally connected and she saw that I was a real person, not some stereotype she had imagined. She had never come to see me in any of my theatre productions. We came to like and respect each other. She was quite bright.

We chose not to live together the following year. She lived with a math major in the Castle, an iconic women’s dorm, now being demolished as it is beyond salvation. It pre-dated Brandeis, was the original building when the campus was the Middlesex Veterinary College with dissection rooms in the basement. Legend goes when the famous architect Saarinen visited campus, he described the style as “Mexican Ivanhoe”.

I went into a suite with other women who clung to their mascara (as I did), several were in Gilbert & Sullivan with me and others were cheerleaders. We actually, occasionally wore a skirt. Carol and I visited rarely our sophomore year. Then she transferred to Stanford. Last I heard, she was living in a lesbian commune somewhere in the Bay Area. Always ahead of the curve.

 

Bobby had the gift of empathy -- the ability to see the world through the eyes of the poor, the unrepresented. Whereas his opponent Eugene McCarthy was brilliant, professorial and cold, Bobby brought warmth, spontaneity and the charisma of a rock star.
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"Oh, I think the Haitians know how to take care of themselves."
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At first 1979 would not seem to be a year of love and laughter, with its gas lines, stagflation, and odd fashions. But in a subliminal moment, a butterfly might alight, even on dried grass or trash, and its perfect wings might wink at you for an instant before it vanishes. That’s how I feel about 1979, my favorite year.

A year earlier three serendipitous events occurred. Against very steep odds, I landed an advertising specialist’s job at a scientific instrument company in Palo Alto, California. I was happy to work in this interesting community, with a smaller, homier feel than it has now, and stroll to lunch across El Camino Real in what had been the town of Mayfield. The day I got the job, out of the blue a college classmate who was looking for a housemate phoned me to see if I knew anyone in the Palo Alto area looking for a place to live. So, I ended up sharing a tiny cottage in Menlo Park with Sylvia and driving my 1969 Toyota down El Camino 10 minutes to work, minimizing the hours-long waits for gasoline fillups. Then, about a month later, I was at my desk at work when I looked up and saw Hugh.

Here was a smiling, tall, strawberry blond man saying hello with an accent that blended Texas and Louisiana. We had dinner that night and were inseparable after that. Hugh was my first and only experience with love at first sight. For an introvert who needs her space, I am amazed at how natural our relationship was, and how everyone recognized and accepted it. We worked in different buildings at the same company and decided to be completely open about our dating. We were embraced. We looked wonderful together. People stopped us on the street and wanted to take our picture.

In 1979, we had fun with Sylvia and her boyfriend at the little cottage, eating Chinese green onion pancakes and watching television on a small black-and-white set with a coat hanger as an antenna. We joined the company bowling team and bowled weekly (I did respectably, he did badly). We traveled to Mexico, seeing the Santiago Peninsula before development, riding on buses, and living on bread and Coca Cola. We walked by the bay in Alviso with Hugh’s daughter Kelly, when the ghost town was still there, waving at the freight train conductors, who honked the train horns in response. Hugh took me to the labs at work to explain how an electric motor functioned. We joked and laughed at coffee breaks with many others. (There were real coffee breaks in the morning and afternoon when people went to the cafeteria and took a breather. How quaint!)

Work definitely was more fun back then. I was growing and learning every day, even managing to win over my nemesis, a product manager named Eva. Built like a triceratops, and just as tough and intimidating, Eva had crawled under barbed wire and walked miles to escape from Hungary during the 1957 revolution. She was afraid of nothing and no one. The male managers and engineers were terrified of her. One of the funniest memories I have of 1979 is Eva unleashing her temper on a rather powerful engineer because he was late on delivering her something. She ended up chasing him around a conference table. I don’t remember if either of them “won” the race. Although I trembled when my boss assigned me to write about Eva’s products, slowly but surely that year, I earned her respect.

Just as quickly as it began, the serendipity ended.  A coworker, who by any analysis should have received a promotion that involved a transfer to Berkeley, blew his interview, and I was “drafted” for a position I didn’t really want but couldn’t refuse. The same week, our landlord, who wanted to capitalize on rising rents, evicted Sylvia and me from the tiny cottage. I moved to Oakland and struggled with the job. Hugh stuck with me for a while, but it was tough, and by the end of the year, the relationship collapsed under the challenges. For me the next three years were very dark.

However, 1979 taught me that things can change on a dime for the better, and many difficulties can pass with time. I learned to pay attention to the chaos and the trash, because at any moment a butterfly might be waving its wings.

"The Cops are coming, the cops are coming" - what were the conditions in the late 60's that inspired the take over and occupation of Harvard University's administration building?
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The year: 1957-1958. I was six and my sister was eight when our parents told these two San Francisco-born California girls that we were packing up and moving to New York City. My father had entered the doctoral program at Teachers College, Columbia University, and we’d be living in Morningside Heights for a year—giving up our house and our big backyard for an apartment in the city. For months before our move we would jump up and shout every time we heard someone say the words, “New York, New York.”

I don’t remember too much about the car ride we took across the country that summer, except for being crammed into the back seat of my parents’ gray Plymouth. I do recall that my sister and I sang “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog” so many times we drove our parents crazy.

We arrived in New York City very early in the morning. Ahead of us lay our first sight of snow, riding in taxis, seeing the Rockettes high-kicking their way across the giant stage, getting hot bagels on Sunday mornings (and learning how you had to time it right to get your bagels before mass was over, otherwise the lines were too long), trips to the automat where the sandwiches lived in little apartments too, exploring Central Park, Grant’s Tomb and Grand Central Station, seeing a Broadway show, and having the opportunity to meet people from all over the world. Also ahead of us (or me mostly) were several of the childhood illnesses we had managed to avoid in California. In one year, I caught and generously shared with my sister both the measles and the mumps. but somehow spared her the curse of head lice. And another thing: I left my appendix in New York City.

We were the new kids at the Agnes Russell School as first and third graders. An adult escorted us to school, even though we lived just across the street in Bancroft Hall, the married student housing for Teachers College. Back home in California, we were free to cross the street to play with the kids who lived up and down the block. We would spend all our summer days outside, coming home when it was dinner time. But in New York, we were under the watchful eye of an adult at all times, even on the playground behind our apartment. We held hands when we walked together. People talked so fast we could barely understand them, especially the big girls who danced at the studio where we took our lessons: ballet for my sister and tap for me.

Our apartment was tiny, and even though my sister and I were used to sharing a room in our small California house, these were very tight quarters. The kitchen was closet-size, making meal preparation a challenge for my mother.

My parents got invited to some fancy parties and we got dragged along too. We dressed up for these and other special occasions: hats and gloves, full-skirted dresses with petticoats, and shiny party shoes. I especially liked the bon voyage parties on the huge ships, when people tossed serpentine streamers and confetti. At the parties, my sister and I collected those fancy toothpicks, the ones with cellophane curls, that were stuck in the little sandwiches. We were fascinated with the furs women wore; we liked to sneak off to find the room with the coats and stoles so we could touch them and decide which one felt the nicest.

Our first real winter: two little girls bulky in hooded jackets, mittens, quilted overalls and rubber boots – posing for my dad as he adjusted the Brownie camera. How magical to watch the flakes fall on our upturned faces! Inside, the unforgettable, nose-wrinkling smell of wet clothes drying on the radiator. Going from the cold outdoors to the stuffy overheated indoors gave us our share of colds that winter, but we didn’t care.

My memory  is a jumble of tastes, smells, sights, and sounds. The stale air of the subway stations, the extra chewy bagels and buttery lox; fragrant rye bread and piles of pastrami and corned beef at the deli; taxis whooshing by, steam coming up from manholes in the street; hot, hissing radiators, bulky snow clothes, mittens on a string; having to take the elevator up to our apartment. The store windows at Christmas time, each one a winter wonderland. The Marilyn Monroe “Seven Year Itch” moment my mother reported when her full skirt billowed up around her in front of a construction crew. The day I had a stomach ache that kept getting worse, the one I didn’t tell anyone about for a few hours because I didn’t want to get in trouble for eating too much candy at school that day. My babysitting neighbor with a copy of Dr. Spock who finally made me bend this way and that way when the hurting got so bad I had to tell, and when I couldn’t bend to the right, she called my parents. My late-night ride in a taxi with my mom and dad when my side hurt so much; my dad and I both cried, and the surgeon, called in from a night at the opera, arrived at the hospital in his formal evening wear — long cape with a colorful lining, top hat—and assured me that I would be fine, but I needed to have an operation to take out my appendix. I told my parents not to worry and then the memory fades to black. A row of black stitches that itched until they got pulled out.  A scar on my belly.

A Passover Seder with new friends in the apartment building. My first taste of Manischewitz wine. Falling asleep at the table.

My dad, touch typing like a fiend on a borrowed typewriter, discovering several pages in that it was a Hebrew keyboard (or was it Hungarian? Either way.)

Dad took us to a diner that had railroad tracks running along the counter. When your order came up, a little train came out of the kitchen with a plate perched on its own car, and stopped in front of you. Ever since then, I’ve yearned to have my food delivered by a train.

Another Dad story: One day he was rushing out to move the car to the other side of the street, like everyone did, when a big Irish cop waved him off. “No need to move the car today, sir. Don’t ya know, it’s Tisha B’Av?” (a solemn Jewish holiday).

Monuments, skyscrapers, Grant’s Tomb. Alma Mater and Butler Library at Columbia; Morningside Park. Cars and taxis honking, hustle and bustle on the street. Shopping at Alexander’s in the Bronx. Going to the country—in New Jersey—to visit friends of my parents, running to catch fireflies in jars with the other kids. Apartment neighbors we shared a wall with had two little girls too. Thumping the wall between our apartments: shave and a haircut, two-bits.

For years afterward, my sister and I would begin a sentence with “When we were in New York…” as we launched into a story about the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, walking around the Columbia campus, or eating in that little restaurant with the train tracks on the counter. And we were both June Taylor dancers, too. Really. For one year.

I’m the sole keeper of these memories now; my parents and my sister are gone. Remembering my year of being six in the city makes me happy, even the part about the measles and having my appendix removed. My family spent an unforgettable year in New York, and I have the scar to prove it.

 

If I may steal from Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. 2017 had a lot of both, beginning with the still surreal inauguration of the Orange Monster. I keep thinking he has struck a new low, but he keeps surprising me. I made sure to stay occupied and not turn on the TV on January 20. I contrast that to January 20, 2009; Obama’s first inauguration. It was a snowy day in Boston and I was on a physical therapy table, having sprained my knee in a bad fall. A TV was on in the room, but noon came and went as my knee was iced and the ceremony hadn’t started. Nevertheless, I felt hot tears of relief come down my cheeks, knowing that technically, “W” was no longer in charge. As soon as I was done, I rushed home and holed up in front of the TV for the entire day as the snow swirled silently outside; I, cozy on my couch, listening to the stirring words of our new leader. How different I felt this year. My stomach churned as the nightmare began.

From “alternative facts” to “fake news” (as Daniel Patrick Monyihan once said, “You are entitled to your opinions, but there is only one set of facts”), we lurch from one lurid episode to something even more heinous. I thought Charlottesville was awful, with “very fine people” on both sides (as a Jew, with relatives who died in the Holocaust, I have a difficult time calling neo-Nazis, chanting “Jews will not replace us”, “very fine people”, and so should our ignorant leader, with a Jewish son-in-law and grandchildren). But this past week, he talks about poor and ravaged countries as shitholes. He is beyond the pale, irredeemable.

[A side bar to Charlottesville: forty years ago, while living and working in Chicago, I went in to my office at 327 S. LaSalle one pleasant, summer Sunday morning soon after taking my first sales job. I worked for a few hours, then decided to walk the several miles back to my apartment, on the north side. I didn’t know that the neo-Nazi rally, scheduled for suburban Skokie had been moved to Daley Plaza. I walked right into it. I could not believe what I saw. Storm troopers in brown shirts wearing red arm bands with swastikas, giving the Nazi salute. I felt sick and vulnerable. I got out of there as quickly as I could and cried the whole way home. I believe in free speech, but this was hate speech; hateful to anyone who believes in freedom of religion and the rights of human beings.]

His tax cuts, as has been proven countless times, will NOT “trickle down” to help those who need it, but are merely a huge transfer of wealth to those who do not need it, as he was overheard bragging the following weekend to his Mar-a-Lago buddies, “I’ve just made you a whole lot richer”! That’s the name of his game. Our nation has lost its prestige on the world stage and its edge in the global economy. We appear to be running backwards on the issues of climate change, health care, voting rights, education, and equal protection as fast as we can. But enough about how those grifters who are ruining this country. The tide will turn. And the mid-terms are on the horizon. Let’s be positive and work to get rid of gerrymandering, run good candidates at every level, get out the vote and never give up!

Things were much more positive on the home front. Despite a semi-serious gym injury that kept me out of the gym for six months (and at my age, all that nice muscle tone I’d worked so diligently on for five years falls apart far too quickly), eventually got diagnosed properly. I got great treatment on the Vineyard over the summer and was back to my gym routine by the autumn, albeit, with some modifications, as I still get hip and back flare-ups, so I have to be mindful of what I’m doing, concessions to aging and ailments.

I had two fabulous trips this year. As I’ve written about before, through my connection with the Rose Art Museum, which was the Commissioner/curator of the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017, I went with a contingent from Brandeis to Venice in May for 5 days. We saw art around that beautiful city for the first few days, then did the vernissage (preview) of the Biennale for the next 3, including attending the most glamorous gala, hosted by our Board Chair at the Cipriani Hotel on opening night. Cocktails overlooking the Grand Canal, gorgeous dining followed by a hot disco; fantastic night! Final cocktail party at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, then I strolled back alone, across the Accademia Bridge, wandering the streets to my hotel. The light was magnificent. It is no wonder that painters through the centuries have flocked to Venice to paint the exquisite views.

Home in time for the Brandeis graduation of our dear niece, Rae Pfau. We hosted relatives from the mid-west for the weekend and were so proud to add our niece to our alumni base. It was moving for me, after so many years of involvement, to add another family member to our Brandeis family. She went to work for Charles River Labs, not at their headquarters in Wilmington, MA, but at a lab they acquired in Worcester. Nevertheless, we found the hire ironic, as Dan’s father (Rae’s grandfather), worked for founder Hank Foster at Charles River for 30-some years, setting up their germ-free lab over 60 years ago, which was integral to their business at the time. If only Rae’s grandparents had lived to see this turn of events. Rae loves her job.

Late May through Mid-June we went on a fabulous golf cruise to southern England and Normandy. I don’t play golf, so for me, the trip was all about sight-seeing and this particular company does that exceedingly well too. I got to see the Dover Tunnels, where General Ramsey planned and executed the evacuation of Dunkirk. A highlight was a private tour of Highclere Castle, the location for “Downton Abbey” filming, a historic and majestic manor house in the English countryside. Back across the Channel, we were all about the D-Day invasion, spending four full days viewing the landing beaches, Mere Ste Eglise, Ponte du Hoc, Pegasus Bridge, Caen Memorial and several country’s cemeteries: American, British and German. Most moving was being on Omaha Beach at 6:32am, on June 6, just as our brave troops had been 73 years earlier. It felt sacred to be there at that hushed moment, and give thanks that so many were willing to sacrifice so that we could be free.

We had a wonderful summer on Martha’s Vineyard, highlighted by visits by family, friends, even my older son David, in the US from London. He came over to view the eclipse, flew to New York where he has many friends, came up to see us, got sick his last day with us, and was very sick upon returning to New York, winding up in the hospital. It turns out, he and several others had contracted food poisoning at a NYC restaurant, but it took several days to express itself. His trip to see the eclipse fell apart, but was well by the time he had to fly back to London.

Thanks to big brother, our Vicki got a wonderful job in San Francisco. David knew people at OpenAI, an Elon Musk-funded non-profit in the same sector as DeepMind, where he works, and reached out to see if they had an opening for Vicki. They gave her a problem to work on, and a three week contract in June. She took two days to solve the problem. They hired her full-time in August. While she doesn’t know artificial intelligence, they test their theories on gaming platforms, and those she knows and can program very well. One person there said he thought she was the best in the world at what she does! High praise, indeed. She had looked for a job for almost a year and said this is the first time she feels really valued.

The autumn was quiet, just normal living. Going to the gym, rehearsing Mendelssohn’s Elijah, for performance in late January, seeing friends. I got to see both my nephews and my brother and sister-in-law in the autumn, which was a real treat. Dan and I took a lovely trip to New York City, saw “Dear Evan Hanson”, last year’s Tony winning musical and, as my special birthday present, saw “Hamilton”, which I adored! The crowd roared its approval to the line: Immigrants get the job done! Indeed. The show is a marvel, teaching us history in a unique way, the lessons are as fresh today as they were more than two centuries ago. We also got to spend time with several dear college friends. It was an excellent trip.

I turned 65 in December and had a grand day, from the Brandeis Alumni party at the JFK Library (and the Alumni Association called me up in front of 300 people, sang happy birthday to me and gave me a cake and flowers…couldn’t have been nicer), to a lovely dinner with my “birthday twin” and husbands. We discovered long ago that we not only share a birthday, but the exact year. I am 45 minutes older! So we always celebrate together. From there Dan and I went on to cake at my best friend’s house, so I think one could say that I really celebrated.

My kids and other relatives came in for Christmas and we had a great family celebration, so if one could overlook the political climate, it had been a rather good year. Then on December 30, I got word that Dude Stephenson, my beloved Interlochen Operetta director, teacher, friend and mentor of more than 50 years had passed away suddenly. He was not young and with that in mind, I was making plans to visit him next summer, as I hadn’t seen him since 2003. He lived in San Diego and we would talk on the phone at length. Now it was too late and I was heartbroken. Though he was fading, I thought I still had more time. Instead, I will go back to the pine forest of Interlochen next summer for a Celebration of Life for this man who meant so much to me. The featured photo is of the two of us from 1978 when he named me the Best Female Chorus member of Operetta for the first 25 years of the class (it ran for 50 years). I was honored and touched to be recognized by him in such a way, as he knew all of his students and missed nothing. I will miss him terribly.

 

Memorial Day to the Fourth of July, a good length of time for a vacation
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