Suprise Me

Between tick and tock ... make each minute count. Read More

For 40 years my life has intertwined with the music of Bruce Springsteen. On Tuesday I was priveledged to meet Bruce, and it led to a time of reflection on the past years of my life. Read More

In just one trip to the Giant Eagle grocery store I hear about a drunken host with a mynah bird that spewed racial insults, a greedy nightclub owner with a drawer full of stolen watches, and a girl singer with balloon boobs who would always blank out when trying to remember the words to "Accentuate the Positive." Read More

My mom loves to tell a certain set of stories about me over and over. This is one of them: on my first day of first grade I came home from school and drew a diagram of the classroom. My mother already knew I was the smartest kid in California, but this was honest to… Read More

All time is fluid in human experience. At times, the minutes, hours, years fly by. At other times, they drag down the road like zombies. In our search for logic and meaning we measure time — from the billions of years it takes for light to travel from a distant galaxy to the time it… Read More

College Girl – for Aunt Hannah “One is never too old to learn.”  Hannah told us when she announced she was starting college in her 80s. My husband’s aunt Hannah was the gentlest soul I’ve ever known.  No one in our family can remember her saying a harsh or an unkind word. Hannah and her… Read More

The Gift of the Marzipan Magi Our friend John’s parents,  like my husband Danny’s,  fled Europe in the late 1930s as the Nazi horror was unfolding.  John’s folks went first to Shanghai,  and then on to the States,  where a few months later John was born. (“I was made in China.”  he’ll tell you.) During… Read More

My mother was the secretary for her ninth grade class. They graduated in 1953 in Newton, Massachusetts. By the time she and her friends had finished three years at Bigelow, the class had been together for three years. They knew each other well, having grown up together, many of them in the same elementary school… Read More

I needed a present. I wanted it to be special. I was as poor as the usual working-class undergraduate. Read More

I came to college incredibly naive about all things sexual and gender-related. As a theater major, I was certainly surrounded by gays; I was totally unaware. Perhaps they were too, as many were still closeted in the early 1970s. My junior year, I won the role of Sarah Brown in “Guys and Dolls”. The show… Read More