As an added bonus, Jiminy Cricket taught me how to spell "encyclopedia."
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Stroke, stroke, bail…bail..bail…bail! If only you could hear my accent. Moose and Squirrel, Boris and Natasha (did anyone else see her resemblance to the original Barbie?), Dudley Do-Right, Mr Peabody and his boy Sherman. My brother and I loved them all, and reveled in the silliness of the Cold War cartoons with our heroes always defeating the sinister Mr. Big and the witless Soviet spies, the clueless Canadian Mountie who somehow always got his man, and the super-intelligent dog and his Way-Back machine, where we learned some form of history. Bigger than a breadbox, smaller than Texas; it must be Mount Flatten! It was a half hour of bliss within the format of a fractured fairy tale and we felt we were very sophisticated to “get” it.

We couldn’t wait for the cartoon to come on, gladly putting aside any homework, music practice, anything else on our schedules. It was Must-See TV in our household. Later in life, I bought several compilations on VHS format and my kids loved it as much as I had; second generation confirmation of good taste. My younger child, now 27, was saddened when those tapes were ruined two years ago in a massive flood, as they are no longer available in any format. How will we now pass it along for future generations? These days seem ripe for such inspired, clever nonsense.

At a younger age, my brother and I also loved the Disney full-length animated feature films. My first film was Fantasia, my brother’s was Peter Pan, but we both loved Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Dumbo. Bambi. Snow White was before our time, but we saw it when it was re-released. The animation of all of these remains stunning and the music is still singable. I can probably sing all of it right now (of course Disney got help from Tchaikovsky for Sleeping Beauty, but it worked). He was also the master of making the beautiful into the nightmare – he turned out some really scary sequences in all those movies and had us young ones diving for the covers for weeks after seeing those films.

In 1970, just before my brother headed to Israel for two years, Fantasia was re-released and my super-straight brother and I went to see it again. He didn’t know that the hippies had discovered this was a great movie to trip out to and was bewildered by the crowd that showed up at our local theater that evening. I was just amused. The music and animation remain superb; stunning, swirling sequences. One wonders what the animators were high on while imagining those episodes, so long ago.

My brother and I had the worst fight of our lives when he was 8 and I was 3 over a Disney-inspired moment. We had a window seat in our wood-paneled den in Detroit. We each liked to use it as a space on which to play. I was doing a little production with my dolls when he, being much larger, pushed me aside to use it as a desk. He was re-creating a Cinderella ad on a pad of white paper. I tried to shove him back to get my space back, but was unsuccessful. With anger and deliberation, I marched behind him and bit him where I could reach him…on the butt cheeks! He howled in pain. I got my performance space back for a millisecond until our mother showed up and sent me to my room for an hour. Cinderella triumphed. I sulked. My brother and I both got over it and remain the best of friends and both Disney loyalists forever.

Imagine his mortification when the performers assemble on stage completely naked.
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The musical Hair opened on Broadway in April 1968, and I saw it some time that spring with my friend Amy, who lived in Manhattan. Amy had been my roommate the previous summer at a program for high school students at Syracuse University. It was Amy who first introduced me to marijuana, so it was fitting that we went to see Hair together. We were probably stoned at the time. We adored this groundbreaking show that glorified long hair, and hippies, and drugs, and the anti-war movement. The title of my story, as you may have recognized, is a lyric from the title song.

My hair was a focal point of my life long before that musical, and has continued to be throughout my life. Hair in the places it was NOT wanted was, over the years, bleached, waxed, shaved, tweezed, electrolyzed, and lasered. Hair where it WAS wanted, on my head, was braided, ponytailed, teased, straightened, dyed, grown long, cut short, and never, ever exactly the way I wanted it. Much more than clothes or shoes or make-up, it was the degree of my satisfaction with my hair that always determined whether I felt good about my appearance on any given occasion.

In high school and college, when it was so, so important to have long, perfectly pin-straight hair, my curly locks were the bane of my existence. I used home hair straighteners with names like Curl Free and Uncurl, which would work for a few weeks, unless it rained. I also had it professionally straightened at the beauty parlor, but that was only a little more successful. Ultimately I took to ironing my hair to get it straight. This entailed kneeling down in front of the ironing board and spreading sections of my long hair over the board. Holding my hairbrush in one hand and the iron in the other, I would use the brush to pull the hair taut, then follow the brush with the iron over the entire length of the hair. Since I couldn’t see what I was doing, I would sometimes start to put the iron down on the hand holding the brush, and I would end up with little triangular burn marks on my brush hand from the tip of the iron. But I achieved the result of long straight hair, parted in the middle, that was so crucial at that time. I started growing it long at the beginning of high school, and continued all through college and law school, with only occasional trims. At its longest it was below my waist. Always, I ironed it to make it pin straight, and always if there was rain or high humidity, it curled anyway.

Janis Joplin was the first celebrity I can remember who let her curly hair be natural. Much as I loved her, I was still more interested in looking like Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell. However, as the ’70s were coming to a close, I finally surrendered to my curl. Having graduated from law school, now working at my first “real” job, where I frequently appeared in court against much older (male) attorneys, I wanted to look professional, and I wanted to look older. Both of these goals seemed to dictate cutting my hair short. Once it was short, it was impossible to keep it straight, because it was the weight of my long hair that had helped to control it at least somewhat. So I started investigating curly hair styles. In the decades since then my hair length has fluctuated up and down, but I have always let it be curly. Hairdressers now invariably rave about how wonderful my curls are, and I just have to laugh and say “Where were you in the ’60s?”

3 generations of curly hair, circa 2000

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday.
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One year the Native Americans even showed up.
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…I am not thankful as much for them as I am to them…
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It is that time of the year when we take stock of our blessings and enumerate what we are grateful for. It feels trite and yet appropriate to feel gratitude that my children are well and have good values; that I feel love and respect from my family and friends, that I have health and physical comfort.

At the time of my mother’s death, a close friend reminded me that my mother taught me to love the arts and without that, my friend and I would not have met. The arts mean a great deal to me. I sing in a community chorus. We are currently rehearsing the Brahms German Requiem, a seminal piece of choral music. Just rehearsing it last Monday brought me great comfort and joy, for the first time in almost a week. That is meaningful. I volunteered at a large art sale which benefits the School at the Museum of Fine Art this past week. I got to look at lots of good art. While I cannot make art, I appreciate looking at it. I was a theater major in college. All the arts challenge and excite me and I am grateful to be knowledgeable about a wide range of artistic pursuits, and open to continuos learning.

In thinking about particularly memorable Thanksgiving celebrations, three come to mind that I will now share.

My father filed for divorce from my mother in early 1980. Though their marriage had been broken for years, she was in shock and fought the offered settlement for a difficult year. It was futile, as the ruling came down exactly the same a year later, so the only people who benefitted were the lawyers, but she was stubborn. My father had been sleeping in a different bedroom for years and was advised by his lawyer that he didn’t need to vacate the house, so they were still under the same roof. They planned Thanksgiving together. I knew it would be our last as a family and decided I wanted to go to Detroit to be with them. We had been with Dan’s parents the year before anyway, so it was my family’s turn. BIG mistake. My father always did all the cooking for holiday meals and he took on the chores this year as well, doing the turkey and all the trimmings. He made his luscious sweet potato with marshmallow souffle. But Dan liked yams, dripping in carmelized brown sugar and butter, the way his mother made it, so nothing was right by him. The dining room table was set with the little pilgrim candles, the same ones I will use this week. The table looked nice, the food was good. Not a word was uttered. We ate in stony silence. We wolfed down our meal in about 15 minutes. It was the most uncomfortable meal one can imagine. I don’t even remember if my brother was there, though I imagine he was. Dan and I got out of there SO fast. We went over to my cousin Connie’s, a favorite, and surrogate mother, who lived close. Her father was my dad’s oldest brother. They were all assembled with their three sons, two dogs and lots of boisterous noise, not the deathly silence we left behind at my house. We enjoyed the rest of the evening with appreciative relatives.

Two years later we had moved out of our first Back Bay apartment and were in a holding pattern, waiting for the next, larger, ground-floor unit, further up Beacon St. to be finished. We rented a friend’s godmother’s 5th floor walk-up. We came from a 5th floor walk-up, so we were accustomed to the stairs. This one was not air-conditioned and the owner left some of her furnishings behind, so much of our belongings were in storage. Though the condo had a second bedroom, we used it primarily for storage. The kitchen had the barest of utilities in the corner of the open living room; almost no counter space, a moveable butcher block for some cutting and storage and a dining room table, folded against the wall; bare existence. It worked for us, as our new condo was being built a block away. Dan’s grandmother was still living in nearby Brookline. His parents were in New Orleans at this point. I got a call that they wanted to come in for Thanksgiving and I would be hosting. I had to do all the shopping, though Gladys, Dan’s mother would cook, once they got in. Dan’s brother Gerry and my mother also came in. We crammed my mother into the second bedroom. The Pfaus all stayed with Nana in Brookline. I received a letter with the entire grocery list…three pages long. The final line: DON’T PANIC! I still have it. It became the basis for all future Thanksgiving meals and recipes for how to make all of Gladie’s traditional foods got added to my binder. I carried everything, even the 20 pound turkey up the five flights of steps (a kindly neighbor in the building helped me when he saw me on the landing). Dan’s grandmother, using a cane, even made it up the five flights of stairs. We pulled it off, had a lot fun doing it and it stands as a turning point. There would be many more Thanksgivings at my in-laws, but this was the first time we hosted, the son had become the head of the household. 

The final Thanksgiving took place three years ago in Overland Park, KS. My mother-in-law was battling cancer. She had moved into a small two bedroom apartment from the four bedroom house she had shared with one of Dan’s sisters and her two children. She had been undergoing chemo the previous year and we had all come in for that Thanksgiving too. This year she was on a different regime, was considered in remission, but we all wanted to be there, so our kids came in from both coasts, and we were all together. Two of Dan’s sisters lived in the same complex and did much of the cooking. We gathered around the small table, sitting on stools, bridge chairs, whatever worked. We saw his brother the day before. He was with his wife’s family. The featured photo is Dan kissing his mother. It is the final photo I have of the two of them together. We went around the table, saying what we were grateful for, enjoyed our meal together, enjoyed being together. The next time we were together was the following August, a few hours before Gladie died. She was cogent when we arrived and each had our time alone to say goodbye. She told me that I was never just her daughter-in-law, but I was always her fourth daughter. I had known her since I was 20 years old. She was always very good to me. I am grateful she was in my life.