Will be making a page called Rove Rage, and all posts will be crossposted at BIO

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Here’s a link to the entire Neil Young “living with war”. Memo to me: buy new computer speakers. The 20″ bargain rate monitor might be great–but the sound. However, it’s an amazing CD. Proudly stole it from the Impeach Bush coalition. An impeachment hearing is the only way we will know what’s going on–the last three words are from one of the greatest albums ever made “What’s going on” by Marvin Gaye

Chris interviewed Shayna. Great inteview–but great interviewers like Shayna tend to be great subjects. Wonderful questions, Chris

When I feel crazed, when the world feels out of sync, when I can no longer trace my footprints, I try to remember what it was like to retreat into a private world filled with still to be discovered splendor and unimaginable adult treats.

I held onto the fantasy so long that it almost became real, or maybe it was real. Though at this second as I try to keep the swirling sand from settling into my eyes, I truly can’t remember.

Life was different yesterday;it just was. Better; my feet were deeply rooted into the sand. I didn’t have to worry about standing tall, or losing balance while I could walk to the edge of the world safe in the knowledge everything would remain secure.

I miss yesterday when everything was possible, and I could walk to the edge of the world and back.

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The post below this one is depressing. I made a page of my Mainstream media press, and liked what I had to say so.

Here’s a link to the article I was quoted in on the doorman’s strike. Have always believed The Christian Science Monitor is about the only paper in America with integrity. Also really like Stephen Humphries who interviewed me. As in, I liked him, before he contacted me. Now I love him

My first cover story:

Newsday did a group interview on baby boomers who blog. Continue Reading »

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I sort of accidentally wrote a BIO post. I don’t mean it to offend most people; only people who believe that religion belongs in a public office building, and people who somehow still see this country as being on a winning good path. While Courting is non-political, or tries to be, I very proudly belong to coalitions that wish to impeach Bush, because only with an impeachment hearing can we learn the truth

Wrote this story several years ago for a writing class. Never sure whether or not to use it as the intro, with editing, to my book. Put it up and took it down. It’s an absolutely true story that I wanted to disguise as fiction, but blogging has taught me that people relate with empathy to truth. Nothing bad happens in this story, it’s just very me and my family. Was going to use song titles for each chapter from the correct year–”Daddy’s Home by Shep & The Limelight. Was very young; but don’t think that anybody thought of it as a child porn song then, now…

Christmas break 1961
Daddy promises to take me to the ice skating rink in Great Neck later. My little sister is at her best friend Debby’s apartment in our 40 family garden apartment court at the edge of North East Queens.

My best friend, Lori, lives two doors down, but she’s away with her family, in their new Lincoln Town car with electric windows. My other friends are either away or they’re not speaking to me or I’m not speaking to them. I’m in sixth grade, and I used to be the first girl anybody would call or call up the window to. Now hardly anyone does. Near the candy store the other day I heard my cousin, Ken, call me a goof to a girl he was trying to impress

Eleven is a very difficult age, I think as I look out the window at the deserted court. It’s almost never empty. No matter what the weather parents sit on the park benches and kids play in the grass, but the snow’s really more ice than snow, and it’s freezing. Daddy’s such a slow, careful driver he can drive in any weather but blizzards. It’s about eleven AM. In our house that’s early for a weekend or non-school day.

There’s going to be a big football game. Daddy hates football, but he likes to make many charts showing possible plays. Then men bet on it. Mommy says it’s okay.

“Daddy’s special. He likes excitement. Other men, they bet the rent or the mortgage, and food money. Daddy saves money each month and only bets extra money. Daddy will make sure we always live well.”

“Uh, mommy, we live in a four room apartment. I have to share a room with Elka.”

We moved to the garden apartments, (or “up the hill” as mommy and daddy call it) a huge community when I was four. We were supposed to live here for a year while my parents looked for a house in Great Neck. Elka and I love it here, but lately I really want my own room, and I let mommy know that at every opportunity. Elka’s half of the room is decorated with her own paintings. I had Fabian posters up but took them down for Warren Beatty ones. I can’t keep the house argument up. I know that they are seriously looking. We’ll probably buy a house when I’m away at college. Daddy likes to check everything out 200 times.

My parents take an hour to decide on what brand of toilet paper to buy. I’ve seen them fight over that. Then I watched them make up. I think that’s one of the reasons adults fight. Chloe wants to crawl under the table when they make out in a restaurant but I like it.

“I wish daddy would get ready.”
“I’m sure he will be ready soon, sweetie, your daddy loves taking you the rink. He wishes he could skate.”

I’m not a great skater but I love going round and round the rink while the loudspeakers play songs like “What’s your name?” and “The lion sleeps tonight.” I’m getting bored looking out the window, so I go to the bookshelf where I take out a book I have looked at but rejected many times.

I take A Tree Grows in Brooklyn into my bedroom. Soon I’m in a world so similar and different from mine. Francie Nolan’s eleven, and lives in Williamsburg Brooklyn in the early part of the century. Mommy’s from Greenpoint which is walking distance from Williamsburg and was born later than Francie. Francie’s Irish and our natural enemy as we’re Jews, and the Irish and Poles in Greenpoint threw tomatoes and other things at mommy and her brother and sisters.

I love Francie. She’s lonely and bookish, but loves her family and I have never read a book before where the heroine thinks like me. This is the best book I have read so far. Mommy calls us into lunch. I don’t want to eat because the Nolan’s have just moved to Lorimar Street which is right next to Greenpoint and I want to see what happens next. I have forgotten that daddy’s supposed to take me skating. Mommy asks what I’m doing.
“Reading a wonderful book. A Tree grows in Brooklyn.”
Mommy’s all excited.
“Oh don’t you love it? Isn’t it a wonderful book? What are you up to?”
I’m confused. “You don’t like Irish people.”
“It’s different. Books talk about universal experiences.”
“Oh like how we’re all alike.”
“Exactly.”
“But Johnny, Francie’s father drinks. Half the time he can’t even work because he drank so much. Francie loves her father anyway. I wouldn’t love daddy if he drank.”
“That’s the Irish curse. Every group has its own problems. That’s why books are so wonderful. Girls love their daddies no matter what they do. Finish the book and we’ll talk.”
Mommy smiles her big toothy smile. She’s five feet tall, with short curly brown hair, big brown eyes, a good nose, and is cute. Everybody likes her. I’m already taller than her. My body grows each day. But I’m awkward and weird and want to look like mommy. I made daddy promise that if I continue growing so fast he will have my legs cut smaller when I’m thirteen. Mommy thinks that I’m very pretty and smart. But we fight all the time. She says that’s because we’re so much alike. I don’t think that I’m pretty, smart or at all like mommy. She just says that because I was adopted and she wants to make me feel good when we’re not fighting over my hair not being brushed properly and things like that.

Every summer right after my birthday Chloe and I go to Camp Spring Lake in Barryville for six weeks. It’s a progressive Jewish camp where we don’t really have to do anything except make pow-wow sites for camping, swim, have socials, and debates on Saturday morning at Oneg Shabbats. We learn about civil rights and how we are responsible for helping the less fortunate. Most campers don’t have a professional for a daddy, nor do most of the kids in Queens. I have to explain what an accountant does. I don’t even bother trying to explain the difference between an accountant and a CPA.

Bubbe Ceila, my mom’s mom just died. She taught me about The Scottsboro Boys, The Triangle Shirt Waist Fire and other important things. When mommy found out that she had just died, she went running into my arms. I felt special and remember being surprised about how much mommy needed me. I bet I miss Bubbe almost as much as mommy does, and more than her younger sisters Faye and Elaine who are bohemians. When I’m angry at mommy and ride my bike through the huge back alleys I pretend that I live with my birth mother who is a real beatnik, lives in the Village, lets me grow my hair to my knees and walk around without shoes. Nobody told me this but I know it.

Mommy goes to get daddy. He hasn’t shaved, and his clothes are old and in taters. I remember he’s supposed to take me ice skating and I pout.
“Just give me an hour Pia, and I will take you.”
“Okay.”
We’re eating a Saturday lunch. Mommy makes tuna fish salad with celery, carrots, a little Miracle Whip and a lot of lemon. We’re only allowed to eat potato chips when we eat tuna fish. Mommy and Daddy have every issue of PM Magazine, and mommy knows all about the dangers of fat.
“Max guess what book she’s reading?”
He shrugs.
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”
For the first time since daddy came in for lunch he looks excited.
“Great movie.”
Daddy reads accounting journals, each issue of Mad, and parts of four to seven newspapers a day, but he doesn’t read books. Mommy gets The New Yorker. I read them both. After lunch he goes back to his spread sheets, and I go back to my room.

Mommy calls us into supper. Francie’s father, Johnny has just died. I want to finish the book. I don’t want dinner. I’m beginning to understand why girls love their fathers even if they’re drunks, and what mommy means by a universal experience. I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to read and think. I’m glad we didn’t go to the rink, but I have to remember to pout. Daddy comes into the kitchen.
“I’m sorry Pia, I’m really sorry. I just got carried away.”
He’s never said that he’s sorry to me before. I can’t let daddy know that I’m not angry. He broke a promise, and I tell him that.
“I know, sweetie. How about if you watch A Tree Grows in Brooklyn the next time it’s on TV even if it’s on the late show on a school night?”
“Okay.”

Christmas Week 1962
Last summer at camp my parents sent me a letter saying that we are going to move in October. Nobody has ever heard of this town on Long Island. It sounds biblical. We all think my family’s moving to the Mid East. I wonder if they have Special Progress classes in the Mid East so I can do seventh and eighth grade in one year like I was supposed to do in the city. I wonder why we are moving to the Mid East. The furthest we’ve ever been from New York is Miami where my father’s sister and family live. This doesn’t make sense. Spring Lake doesn’t allow phone calls so I have to actually write them instead of sending one of the pre-addressed post cards mommy addressed and stamped. I wish I could just call and find out why we’re moving some place so far away.

Our new town turns out to be fifteen minutes north east of Queens. We had moved there the year that the expressway came out to it, and now the expressway is built, out to here, and there’s an exit just a few blocks from our eight room, four level house. It’s cheaper than Great Neck, almost all Jewish, and the parents are building a school district from scratch.

I hate our new town. When my records finally came they asked me if I wanted to be in the honor class. I was doing so badly I said no without even thinking. We change teachers but go from class to class with the same kids. My last name starts with “S” and I’m with the “H” through “M”s. My life’s not fun. How could I have ever thought that eleven was a horrible age? Twelve’s much worse. I haven’t made one friend in school.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is going to be on the late late show tonight. Daddy said that he would wake me. Daddy stays up working until two or three most nights, but he doesn’t get up until 9:30 AM. I can’t wait to be an adult. I just reread A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and have decided that I will read it every Christmas for the rest of my life. Daddy wakes me before the movie begins.

Daddy and I go into his red burlap wallpapered office. He sits on his swivel chair next to his huge mahogany desk, and I lie on the red plaid wood framed couch. The carpet’s red with some black. A tree Grows in Brooklyn is a hundred twenty eight minutes long. It starts at two Am and won’t be over until almost five AM. Daddy’s been muttering all week about how he thought it would be on the late show during a school night, and how he’s only good until four AM these days.

We watch the movies in silence only getting up when absolutely necessary. It’s a perfect night and as daddy and I twirl our hair almost in tandem, I think about how Francie’s father always makes promises that he doesn’t keep, and daddy doesn’t make many but when he does he always eventually keep them.

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Today is Patriotic Cowgirl’s 25th birthday. Hope it’s a wonderful day

You feel agitated, angry, irrational as you had in the worst of PMS days. Despite the color coded warnings your friends dispersed long before the terrorist warning, you knew your mood would change within two weeks and you could perform behavior modification on yourself.

Now you’re beginning to wonder if you’re just agitated, angry and irrational, a combination that you couldn’t dare live with. Or maybe it’s something else entirely, an inability to enjoy blogging because you just can’t write fresh material five days a week, work on your book, do the hated organizational aspects of your blog, proofing the oldest posts that were written pre-Google spell check, and categorizing all of them, commenting on other blogs, thinking about blogging, having blogger attached to your name.

What’s that other thing? The way you make your living? Right, your investments, the ones you have been ignoring because of some kind of weird theory that the money you’re losing in income, you’re making in stocks.

It makes no sense, but between taking your blog on vacations, living at the dentists office, and having a social life, you have deluded yourself into thinking that the heavy metal band in your mouth alone, is insurance for your future. You just better not die before you outlive the costs of your soon to be perfect mouth. The small lips you have always hated will be slightly enlarged. Nobody ever really knew that you had a small mouth as you began wearing lipstick at eleven. You thank your mother for that.

The few lines above your mouth and below your nose will probably be eradicated. You have taut skin so the rest of your face doesn’t need any work. The dental work will probably end in June exactly two years after it began. You just don’t know if you can make it to the finish line. Do you have a choice?

Having a social life can be defined in many ways. You choose to define it losely as in: you see friends twice a week, and family for holidays and special events such as your niece in Annie this Sunday. Really should have gotten her a Coach something before Katie left for her new job. Your niece’s wallpaper on her cell is the Coach pattern. You could have used a Coach bag.

You’ll probably get another pair of MBT sneakers and sandals as you have discovered that they’re key to living your life. You’re no longer just sitting at the computer but exercising your legs, and you can run all over the city with them and while your legs may feel as if they’ve been worked out, they never feel tired or become blistered.

You had too much publicity in two weeks and feel drained. You wonder if people think of you as a one hit wonder, not that you ever had a hit.

You have always been hard on yourself, and you have to stop that if you want to get anything done. You wonder how you can do that when there’s never a feeling that you’re about to cross the finish line, that you’re not even a fifth there. Maybe you would be happy as a fact checker or a clerk at B&N.

No, you just have to keep going.

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Have no idea where Little Luce’s paper is and don’t want to sound like a hovering aunt. Had I moved to California fifteen years ago I would have missed out on watching the day to day growth of the most amazing teenager that I know. I’m not being biased; she enchants everybody who meets her.

Her parents didn’t want to know her sex. When I arrived at the hospital, her mother’s cousin was on the phone: “it’s a girl.” Wanted to kill her as I had waited nine months, I could have waited nine more minutes.

Her father, a cameraman so he should have known better, was following a Black boy around the hospital. Lucia, George and Little Luce are all whiter than I, and I am very pale.*

I call her Little Luce because she was obsessed with Lucille Ball most of her life, and her bedroom is a virtual shrine to Lucy including two studio portraits, and a bottle of wine from Ellen’s Stardust Diner which has singing 50’s waiters and waitresses, Grease playing non-stop it seems, and lousy over priced food that somehow feels right.

Lucia and George were Lucy and Desi, the 90’s version. Rafe and I refused to be Ethel and Fred.

Lucia was managing an ornamental plaster shop in NoLita and needed workers, in the mid/late 80’s. I told Rafe who recommended his cousin Humberto and his friend. The friend showed up…Rafe and I take great pride in Little Luce and none in the marriage. George and Lucia were a gene pool made in heaven, and Little Luce has most of the best of both.

We were at the beach when she was about 20 months old. Two blond twins were crying. Little Luce walked up to them, put her arm around their shoulders and talked in a mixture of Spanish and English as she thought they were one language. The girls began to laugh. Their mother was shocked as they never let other kids get near them. Little Luce has that affect on people.

She knew that her father took airplanes to work, and when one would pass she would say “avion, papi.” Then she understood that her father didn’t live in an airplane, but in war torn countries filming amazing montages. Somehow George’s work looks as if the people and images should be set to music.

Music has always been an important part of all of our lives. When she was in utero, Lucia and I sat not three rows away from Eric Clapton. It had to have affected her.

When I would pick her up from her after-school program or some other place, she would introduce me as her friend. It still sends chills down my spine thinking about it.

I took her to see The Nutcracker when she was five at Lincoln Center. Little Luce was the only child to sit enraptured and not move except to the music throughout the ballet. There had been a mini-blizzard that day, and she was thrilled when I let her play in the snow because she was wearing snow clothes instead of a Nutcracker dress as my sister and I called them. Little Luce had thrown a tantrum when her mom refused to let her dress up, but now was as happy as a kid in white snow before it turns black and yellow.

She’s a city kid. And a full fledged teenager who never went through an awkward stage but was a drama queen and probably will be again. It’s in the genes, all sides. And she has me as a role model and friend. I could probably still beat her at a staring contest, but she would win the practical joke contest, no contest. That’s really not fair as I was one of her teachers.

When the Towers imploded she was eleven. It wasn’t easy as the buildings and all that they signified meant a lot to her. The first baby she remembered from birth was my niece who lived in the building closest to The World Financial Center for her first several years. Little Luce and I would visit her.

The Trade Center was the best indoor mall in Manhattan and we would go there, occasionally. Little Luce has never taken her life for granted as I did. There’s always been an almost scary adult in her that’s been tempered by a child who takes much delight from the world. When I was eleven I thought myself too old to act like a child. Fortunately Little Luce never bought into that, though many of her friends did.

That was the year Little Luce developed a love for Billie Holiday, especially “Strange fruit.” She intuitively and immediately understood it.

The apartment was Lucia’s before she met George, and God’s Love, We Deliver began there. Lucia inherited the apartment from Patrick’s lover who was also Lucia’s husband. Because we were losing so many friends from AIDS, Lucia both stopped smoking and began volunteering. Little Luce is doing her community service at the GMHC.

Last week she bought a $30 cable for two bucks and fixed speakers that had been broken for two years. She told me how excited she was now that she found out that she inherited Lucia’s handy person skills. She looks like a younger Lucia, tall, elegant and, uh excuse me, Lucia, with a way better waist. Lucia was all legs when we were young.

Little Luce looks like no particular ethnic group and almost every. When I look at her face I see the future, and I see the baby and child she once was.

There’s so much more she’s going to be discovering in the next few years. It thrills me that she wants to tell me about some of them.

I know that if I leave New York now, she will always be a part of my life. I am not her mother, but one of three or four women who consider her their godchild. It’s egotistical to say that I knew when she ran to others sometimes as a child, she would run to me as a teenager. She has.

*Forgot to explain that they’re Hispanic, and LL actually got a half point taken off the Agpar baby scale because she was “too white,” until Lucia screamed at the doctor to look at her and her husband.

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Everybody loves Cooper for a reason. She gives a damn. Check outHell on Earth; Darfur.The Dawg and MizB are tied at Sar’s caption contest. As they’re two of my favorite people this is way more exciting than it should be. My post might sound like whining. When a person pays so much to get so little, and lacks basic amenities that most other people in most other cities at the same income and age bracket take for granted, I will whine. This post in no reflects my feelings for individuals of any generation. We all tend to think that we invented the wheel. And none of us did!

Should explain that many coops charge maintenance per room rather than per square feet. Therefore though I have only 600 square feet, a kitchen in the foyer that stymies kitchen designers, and no river view I don’t pay all that much less in maintenance than a person who has an 850 square foot apartment with views of the Hudson.

The New York Times answer is different than the ones I have been given including one previously by The Times which states that while views, floors and square feet do play a factor it is the number of rooms as determined by the apartment’s certificate of habitability that counts, and is impossible to change now.

Even I am sick of listening to me complain about life in New York, so on Monday, Little Luce who is fifteen and has lived in Manhattan all her life will do a guest post on a concert we attended when she was little. Had no idea that it had such a big impact on her.

This turned into a post with a reprint of an article in The Times on a subject that I feel strongly about. Washers & dryers, the lengths Manhattanites will go to get one, the amount of money we will pay, and the envy of people like me who don’t have one.

It happens to be the only household chore that I not only enjoy but am good at, aside from arranging food, decorating and making things look good. Used to be a good cook, but a real kitchen would help me re-discover the joy of cooking. My building allows washer-dryer’s, I just don’t have the space. Continue Reading »

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