Sep 20, 2025
*I accept that I am not a wholly or even mostly a good person, but – I am also the kind of person who traps and let’s bugs outside instead of killing them. When I watch a film in which people fall long or tumble out of cars and buildings, I feel it in my body ~ ouch! And, all that said, I cannot tell a lie: I have a ‘hit list’ of conservative men and a few women I would love to knock off. It’s absurd because I literally cannot kill a fly, but oh! How I do love to imagine it, through a very vaselined lens, in a distant, hands-off way, myself dressed as a nun, say, carrying a lethal weapon. I don’t own weapons (other than a few sharp knives for cutting up carrots and etc.), and I have no intention of killing anyone, ever, and – my list is one down because I – and karma – are a bitch. You have reaped what you have sown, Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk said:
“I think it’s worth it to have a cost; unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year. So that we can have our Second Amendment to protect our other God given rights.” *now that there is one sick, stupid statement, and yup, your death proves your point, I guess? Was it worth it, Chas, do you feel freer now? I do!
“As government imposes the will of a few upon the many, the many begin to resist. Ultimately, it becomes necessary for the government to use force to make the people conform.” *this may be my only concern re: his shooting death, as I fear you-know-who may use it to further attempt – as he is now doing – to impose a form of martial law, but not, I bet, in very red Utah, where the shooting took place. An open carry, gun-hugging state also reaping what it has sewn into law.
“I can’t stand empathy. I think empathy is a made-up, New Age term that — it does a lot of damage, but it is very effective when it comes to politics.” *a-hem, & okay then, no empathy for you, Charlie, you nasty prick!
“Death penalties should be public, should be quick, it should be televised. I think at a certain age, its an initiation…What age should you start to see public executions?” *we can ask his very young children, as they witnessed his death. a tragedy for his wife and family, no doubt about it, and they have my fullest empathy and compassion; the dead man gets none; in fact, for me, seeing a white man who spews hate on a regular basis actually dealing with the consequence of same is a kind of justice, but like I said, I am not a good person.
“The biggest thing is this: more younger women need to get married at a younger age and start having kids. The single woman issue is one of the biggest issues facing a civilization. We have more single women in their early 30’s that are the most depressed, suicidal, anxious, and lonely in America’s history (*he means or rather it would be correct to say single men – including divorced men in their mid to later years – are suicidal, anxious, and lonely but accuracy is not a conservative strong suit) because there’s a biological clock that’s going off and they realize that they’re not going to be able to have kids, that they’re not as desirable in the dating market or in the dating pool and so they start to lash out on the rest of society by voting democrat.” *or, again, to be more accurate, young men whose brains aren’t fully developed find this nonsense on line and due to their immaturity and fear of failure (to live up to Marvel’s heroes and more, I propose) are cajoled into voting Republican, and wonder why women, who actually need and want bodily autonomy along with the continued right to vote, don’t want to date them…and then there’s this ‘gem’:
“Black women like Joy Reid, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Michelle Obama…used affirmative action because they do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously…so they had to steal a white person’s slot.” Charlie Kirk was a college drop out who used his ability to provoke to make money. Now that right there is privilege, or stealing – depends, I suppose, on who is doing the asking, or talking.
*for the best take I’ve seen so far on Kirk and this cultural moment, there’s this, from Ta-Nihisi Coates, & Vanity Fair: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/charlie-kirk-ezra-klein-tanehisi-coates?fbclid=IwY2xjawM7hEFleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFEdGZmcFNTZUFON1FOS2thAR5LJQskA84hlzIPLfhgq3xYzKwtZcUIlMOyPAvHM6f0H_B60FUNOBN5TjZ8yA_aem_PkXYdzMXtWITds-PKfTWJw
Sep 19, 2025
There was a period in my twenties when I was poor, living – or trying to – on a grocery budget of ten bucks per week. My transportation budget was another fifteen bucks in the years before daily, weekly or monthly bus and subway passes became available. Oh, how I would have made use of those, to auditions and classes and work, but – it was not to be, not then. Other than the buses and trains I used that money for, I walked everywhere, choosing to work within my neighborhood whenever I could, if I could find something, anything waiting tables, selling shoes, answering phones, or checking coats.
With my ten bucks I would trek to the C-Town on 110th street, four and one half blocks away, where I sought out bargains. I remember a long, long period of buying four cans of beans for a buck, two pounds of thin spaghetti for two bucks, two large cans of crushed tomatoes for a dollar a piece and, finally, a bag of apples for three bucks. This left me two dollars for the same number of ‘special’ days, treating myself to a favorite breakfast: a blueberry muffin from a coffee shop on Broadway in the 100s. Each muffin cost seventy-five cents, which meant I could afford another if I had any change lying around. Otherwise, non-treat days, breakfast was an apple, or two.
Don’t mistake me, I knew then and know now that my poverty was by choice: I had a college degree, and could well have been working forty hours or more a week building a career in one of many different fields. Except that I was working building a life and career as an actor. Everything I made other than the cash I spent on rent, utilities, phone (including an answering service), groceries and travel went to buying the ‘trades’, as well as for acting and dance classes, voice lessons, and an occasional field trip to a show. On those special nights, I would pick up a ticket at the TKTS booth on Broadway for half-price, or less.
This was all a choice, and I was happy to make it.
I spent money I made during four shifts per week at Caffe Pertutti or at Studio 54 on special outfits and shoes for commercial or dance auditions, sheet music for singing auditions and for accompanists, as well as on multiple copies of tapes for voice over or commercial television work, stamps, manila envelopes, and mailers for headshots or tapes, along with special paper for cover letters I sent out by the dozens. I also spent money on workshops where I would get ten minutes, tops, to make an impression on an agent or casting director who was being paid – albeit not much – to give us their advice, and brief individual attention.
Working in restaurants meant I could stretch my money further, as one meal per day was provided whenever I had a shift. But waitressing jobs are hit hard during economic hard times, and the hourly wages were – still are – a joke. Every time I tried to save, some inevitable emergency or Wall Street crash would wipe me out. And there were demands from my family, too. That I visit, that I show up for birthdays and holidays, that I play the role in which I was cast by birth, not choice: daughter, granddaughter, sister, aunt.
Even the ‘fun aunt’ role gets stale after a while.
Travel was expensive, especially during periods when I had no extra cash, and whatever cash I did have I wanted to spend on furthering my career, investing in my self, not listening to my mother complain, or some other form of required passive witnessing. But there I was, often, too often, leaving the city for parts north only to find my family didn’t really want me there, not the me I was becoming independent of them, and their equally valid but wildly different choices.
Money, money, money. It’s juice. It’s energy. It can free us and it can trap us. It is the resultant fruit of our time and how we have chosen to spend it. How I came to hate thin spaghetti covered with black beans and crushed tomatoes. But that sacrifice – the sacrificial slop, if you will – was by choice, mine, and therefore much, much more reconcilable to me than the family slop, entire weekends wasted on being there because why, exactly? Just because. Over time, however, I learned, and stopped traveling north so much, saving time, money, and my continually dashed expectations – and their’s, I suspect!
What I can do with ten bucks is still pretty elastic. I am grateful I don’t need to stretch it, yet grateful too that I can, and did.
Sep 18, 2025
Another school shooting last month, and then yet another last week – and the shooting death of Charlie Kirk. Thoughts and prayers? I can’t even. Kirk died by the sword he lived by, and while I feel compassion for his wife and young children, he deserves none. Women and girls in the state in which he was killed – Utah, an overwhelmingly white, Republican place – are dying, or being flown out of state for basic healthcare due to the policies of male legislators who look and think like this now deceased college drop-out creep. There are many kinds of violence, and one of them is the ongoing violence against women and girls and our right to own our own bodies. More on Kirk another day. Because…
…there’s this side of the ongoing story of gun violence in the U.S., from NPR re: the recent school shooting in Minnesota, and yes, the sound you hear is my head exploding: As a lone shooter carried out a mass shooting that killed two children and injured 15 other children and three adults, children were protecting other children.
“We had one kid that covered up another kid and took a shotgun blast to his back,” Marty Scheerer, chief of Hennepin Emergency Medical Services, said on Thursday.
Bigger kids were able to quickly help little ones in the church because many of them had been paired together in a buddy system, says Michael Burt, a parent whose family has five kids at Annunciation Catholic School. He says it’s a tradition at the school, meant to help younger students learn how to get around the campus, and how to behave during services.
“So for instance, seventh graders get, say, a third and a first grader, and they walk to church, school Mass, with each buddy [holding] a hand, and they sit next to them in church, teach them how to do church,” he says.
Then someone started shooting.
“The first action by those middle schoolers was to push their buddies down under the pew,” Burt says. “Which is why the middle schoolers were the ones that were standing the longest and were largely the injured, acting in heroism … and then covering the little ones under the pews.”
This, ladies and gentlemen, is America, 2025.
Since the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, 26 years ago, nearly 400,000 American children have experienced gun violence and concomitant trauma while at school. Kids being killed or severely injured includes the deep, life-long injury being done to many other children who have lived through the absolute horror of seeing their friends, classmates and trusted adults being shot and killed around them, or of having to hide in complete terror in what should be a safe place, as gunshots ring out in their school.
In the U.S. and the U.S. alone, it’s an epidemic. It is a political, moral, and collective failure of us all – of us all – that hundreds of thousands of children have lived through this uniquely American ‘style’ of violence while at the same time efforts to enact basic gun safety laws to protect them continue to be stymied.
The rate of gun violence in the U.S. is so high, so consistently high, that since 2020, it has been the leading cause of death for children and adolescents, surpassing car accidents for the first time since data and records have been kept. Also notable, the U.S. is an extreme outlier among developed nations; our a gun homicide rate is 77 times higher than Germany and 33 times higher than Australia. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns.
Even basic gun safety laws widely supported by the public – universal background checks, red flag laws, and strict restrictions on weapons manufactured for use in war – have been blocked time and again in Congress because the vast majority of Republicans have prioritized campaign contributions from the gun lobby over the lives of our children.
We don’t have to live this way.
UNLIKE CONGRESS, following the murder of 20 children at their elementary school in Newtown, Ct. one mom, Shannon Watts, had had enough, starting the organization, Moms Demand Action. MDA joined together with others working to end gun violence to form a non-profit organization, Everytown for Gun Safety, which is now a movement of nearly 11 million parents, gun violence survivors, gun owners, elected officials, and others committed to standing up to the gun lobby and fighting for our kids, theirs and all of those impacted by gun violence in this country.
If you want to get involved nationally or with a local chapter or to donate to support Everytown for Gun Safety, do so at https://everytown.org
We can do better.
Sep 17, 2025
Have you ever heard of the ‘Matilda Effect’? Which is not, by the way, related in any way to the country of Australia, where ‘Waltzing Matilda’ is a secondary, casual national anthem. Well, the Matilda Effect’ was a term coined by Margaret W. Rossiter. Who dat? Lemme explain, and why she matters, as does the Matilda Effect.
The Matilda Effect—which term Rossitor first used in 1993 – describes the systematic erasure of women’s achievements in science. Rossitor named it in honor of activist, suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage, who sounded the alarm about women being erased a century earlier. And if you’re wondering who that is (I sure did), here’s Gage’s wiki page because the discoveries continue of the many amazing, ground-breaking women who made history, and have been largely forgotten in the process of its recording. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_Joslyn_Gage
Rossiter spent decades combing through archives, letters, and forgotten publications, uncovering the stories of women who worked without pay, without recognition, and very often without even the right to put their own names on their own scientific etc. discoveries. Her three-volume Women Scientists in America is more than scholarship—it’s a revolutionary act of restoration. Its creation and compilation is also an act of justice.
Every biography Rossitor found and highlighted placed women at the center of the long scientific story where we have always belonged. She proved that the exclusion of women wasn’t the result of individual failures, but rather of systemic choices and barriers built into the structure of science, mathematics, research, academia, and the larger culture itself.
Rossitor’s research inspired programs and policies that ensure today’s women in STEM are credited, published, and remembered. Her work has provided a framework for those who have worked in STEM, and on the furtherance of women’s rights in all workplaces.
Honors like the Sarton Medal, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Guggenheim recognized her work and scholarship, but perhaps the most fitting tribute is the Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize—awarded to those continuing her mission.
From Wiki, which page is linked below, because this she-ro – and the concepts she developed – are central to today’s conversations around gender and race: “In the early 1980s Margaret Rossiter offered two concepts for understanding the mass of statistics on women in science and the disadvantages women continued to suffer. The first she called hierarchical segregation, the well-known phenomenon that as one moves up the ladder of power and prestige fewer female faces are to be seen. This notion is perhaps more useful than that of the glass ceiling, the supposedly invisible barrier that keeps women from rising to the top, because the notion of hierarchical disparities draws attention to the multiple stages at which women drop off as they attempt to climb academic or industrial ladders. The second concept she offered was “territorial segregation”, how women cluster in scientific disciplines. The most striking example of occupational territoriality used to be that women stayed at home and men went out to work.”
All hail Margaret Rossitor!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_W._Rossiter
Sep 16, 2025
I knew a woman who liked to refer to her fellow human beings as ‘sheeple’, as in sheep-people who were blindly following their dumb animal instincts over various cliffs, cliffs she avoided because she was much smarter, much sharper, never led anywhere other than her own way. I knew her and her then husband for about a decade, when I was in a public-facing job that required me to get along with her, her then husband, and their two really very charming little girls. But. I couldn’t stand her, and her internet persona – where the sheeple word was used time and again – was especially noxious.
In writing the above, I acknowledge my hypocrisy, and that I must chastise myself for doing the same thing, basically, because yup, I too refer to others as ‘idiots’ at times, albeit not on social media. Okay, sure, I don’t ever use the word sheeple, but still, it’s unkind to refer to others as idiots. And, TBH and ffs, if we haven’t entered a new age of idiocy, including resistance to experts, to science, to intelligent discourse, I don’t know what else we’re in; this makes being kinder when referring to the less well-informed a bigger challenge. Sigh. It’s hardddddd.
But that’s just it. Other people aren’t idiots; they’re un- or mis- or ill-informed. And the internet has unleashed a host of ills including self-appointed ‘experts’ who confirm our own biases, what Bill Maher refers to in his segment ‘I don’t know that it’s true, but it feels true, therefore it’s true.’ My own brother, a science guy, occasionally posts a link to various YouTube clips denying climate change, and it makes my head explode because with less than 3 minutes of research, his source for this science denying b.s. is revealed to be a geology major with an MBA, not a climatologist but rather an opportunist who denies human driven global warming for profit on the internet, where – SHEEPLE – find him. LOL.
Not sheeple, but rather people for whom his opinions – however factually inaccurate – fit their preconceived notions of the truth. ‘It feels right.’ Plus, he’s a middle-aged educated white male who speaks well and owns a microphone, behind which he sits!! We have all be conditioned to trust that guy, whatever he’s saying, the balding white dude who just ‘makes so much sense!’
How to unplug, un-condition, reframe, or recondition that? With patience and persistence. And kindness. If we cannot treat others with decency and respect, how do we dig ourselves out of the current era of crazy? If I cannot see any good in my neighbor because he loves him that Donald guy – how will I ever convince him he’s misguided, misdirected, mistaken but not, ever, unloved, unloveable, lost, worthless? Deep breaths.
And, because this, too – from Robert Heinlen – is true, it won’t be easy: “You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.” But, no one ever said it would be easy, did they?
