*a poem from A.A. Milne …tis the season, & the season at last is spring…
She wore her yellow sun-bonnet,
She wore her greenest gown;
She turned to the south wind
And curtsied up and down.
She turned to the sunlight
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbour:
“Winter is dead.”
I was finally able to see Hamnet, which I loved (the movie theaters ‘locally’ are 45 minutes away). The book was great; I love Maggie O’Farrell’s writing; the film was a successful distillation of it’s essence, visually very beautiful. Because a close friend has lost a child – a central plot point – it also had me sobbing practically before it began, but that’s what living and loving others can – and should – do to a human.
I am a theatre person to my bone marrow. I love, love, love the theatre – despite almost never going to it (is that as weird as it sounds?), so perhaps it’s more honest to say I love the theatre as one loves an idealized lover, from a distance. Of course like the movies theater, theatre theatre are a ways away, so maybe not weird after all! The theatre I idealize and love, however, mixes with my memories of studying acting in the U.K., where they truly approach and treat both the theatre and theatre acting as a craft, and national treasure.
We in America tend, in my view, to treat it like a gross lottery, and only, mostly, the luckiest, most beautiful or connected people need apply, additionally elevating the lottery winners, whoever they are, to the point of gods – which has killed more than a few of these not god-like, often very vulnerable souls. An oversimplification, but…
Hamnet’s culminating scene is in The Globe Theatre, opening night of the newest play from Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet. It was wonderful, showing the experience of being in a space while allowing oneself – en masse, with others – to be overwhelmed by a story painted in words by players in costume. The book and film also successfully reframe Shakespeare’s life in Stratford as loving and full, if not fulfilling enough for the bard. London, London, not Stratford, is where theatre happens.
Both the book and film position his heretofore much maligned or dismissed wife as central to his life, his art, and his vision. That reframing matters, and is yet another reason among so many others why we need more and more and more women writers, directors, conceivers, inventors, coaches, bosses, leaders – centering women in ways unknown to date.
I spent a decade studying Shakespeare, in college and after, performing in Loves’ Labours Lost, 12th Night, Troilus and Cressida (in leather, no less), Henry V, and a few others lost to memory. The language, the language, the language! His best works are sublime, his lesser works are still filled with poetry and imagery that is compelling, beautiful, memorable and – to me – beloved. I never had a problem memorizing all those lines – they flow from the tongue, they fit, they make sense, they are like that fairy tale of old, where one sister has flowers and diamonds, pearls, rubies and gold dropping from her mouth each time she opens it to speak.
Yes, that is Shakespeare. To me.
Once, many moons ago, an infatuated fella read these lines to me; it was pretty compelling I gotta tell ya, even if it didn’t last!!
Sonnet 23
As an unperfect actor on the stage
Who with his fear is put beside his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart;
So I for fear of trust forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
O’ercharged with burden of mine own love’s might.
O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.
O, learn to read what silent love hath writ.
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.
He was and is the eldest grandchild on both sides and the eldest child born to two eldest children. Like them, he is intelligent, very much so, and like them he was been spoiled and petted since his first days on earth. He also was born with both hips displaced due to my sister’s bulimia; she had only gained, I think, 11 pounds with him, and was, throughout her pregnancy, binging and purging as she had been for about, oh, 6 or 8 years by then.
That’s not good, as it turns out, for baby. Y’think? So the ride – his – hasn’t been perfectly smooth, is what I’m saying. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say he was conceived and born in darkness, yet since then, it’s been pretty light, breezy and damnably easy.
He’s a college grad, a Bulldog, and when at Yale (his father’s alma mater), he experimented with drugs, leading to a few escapades with members of his own sex (he used to confide in his Auntie M). Shortly after that, he embraced a conservative Catholic lifestyle, including beliefs like abortion is murder, all sex outside that which is procreative is a sin, homosexual marriage is an evil, society destroying choice, and etc. As you might imagine, he and I have fallen out.
Actually, we fell out – or rather I gave up on him after he ran for office, telling me he’d lost because the other guy – the other candidate – was queer and black so of course he beat my nephew in a blue segment of Maryland. Ick. Racist, homophobic, sexist, misogynistic – he’s the whole package of bigotry. I walked away, we were at a family party, but I should’ve said, maybe he worked harder than you did. Maybe he doesn’t home school his children, if he has any, radiating superiority and religious purity (ICK) everywhere he goes, as you do. Maybe he was and is the better candidate for the job, you pluperfect asshole.
In truth, he’s his father’s son, and his dad is all of the above, and a person of disinterest to me for decades. Oh well! That’s fam-damn-ily!
I bring this up because I receive a fatuous, self-referential holiday letter annually from said bigot (the nephew). It arrived rather late, as – one presumes – they just had (my sister texted me) their 5th child on 12/24 (birth control is a total no-no), but why they didn’t name him Jesus is beyond me. Maybe it’s too Latino?
The letter, which I didn’t and don’t ever read, rather tossing the entire thing into the paper recycling at the Post Office when I see the Maryland postmark, generally speaks of violin lessons and school excellence (the kids are now, I think, in public schools, but they might be in a Catholic school), their local church, as well as men’s retreats of a religious nature that Luke has gone on, the mention of which – this is years ago now – made me laugh out loud.
Men’s retreats, huh? Oh I bet you love those, Luke.
I wish him and his brood well. I also wish for them to stay as far away from me as is humanly possible. This year, I’ve written and sent a note asking he remove me from his holiday letter list, because save your postage, I don’t want to hear from or be in relationship with bigots.
Let’s see if Mr. Big(ot) respects my request, or not. Fingers x’ed!
What can I say about JHLB? Let’s start with her status as one of my least favorite humans, and for several good reasons, the least of which may be her having lost our community its local paper. Established in1863, it was a staple of this region’s life and history, recording lives lived while affording folks the ability to stay in touch with community events and one another, as well as to celebrate our rural, sparsely populated chunk of America.
That is a great loss, a terrible loss. How did she do this? Oh, you know, her usual blend of arrogance, incompetence, greed and pure as the driven snow pissed on by packs of ravening coyotes bullshit.
Purchased by JHLB in 2017, the News was gone by 2020, and those of you out there who – between 2019 and 2020 – purchased multi-year subscriptions (buy 2 years get another whole year for free!!), which one of my close friends did, whoops! Because only 6 months later, she shut that paper down. Wait!! JHLB is 100% looking into how you can get that money back, as in oops, not at all. Actually, the way she put it was “I’ll fight to get you your money back” – fight with whom? Yourself? It’s like Orange Menace suing the IRS of which he is in charge. No refund yet, folks, but hey, it’s a mere 6 years later… Thankfully, I didn’t buy a subscription, having got her number (ZERO) years earlier.
The family who had owned the paper all those years thought about starting it up again, but JHLB had loaded it with so much debt – in order to pay off her personal debt (helped along by numerous ‘special deal’ subscription fees) – it was unthinkable, and impossible, even for them.
But that’s the least of it. She’s a bully. So what? So are a lot of people. I’ve been accused of the same thing. She’s a liberal. So what? So am I, but with a significant difference: I support liberal and moderate women in public office, and in various other positions of authority; JHLB makes them her competition. In other words, she’s a Queen Bee liberal, a toxic blend of arrogance and deep longing for proximity to and approval from male sources of power and male power, period.
A conventional, still practicing Catholic, JHLB aspires to community leadership, while having destroyed a local newspaper that actually led, however much I disagreed with their deeply flawed (fact checking? huh?! what’s that?!), sexist former editor, who was additionally easily led by a manipulative asshole/longtime reporter because of course he was – as was JHLB. Still, the newspaper and that idiot of an editor actually served the community. JHLB only serves herself.
But more than anything, what I despise JHLB for is her total failure to protect her own daughter. That betrayal, that horror, makes any friendly relationship between us impossible despite our families having known one another since forever.
JHLB was married twice, and in her first marriage – to a player, it must be admitted – she had a daughter. It must be admitted too that JHLB suffered as a result of having divorced hubby numero 1, her mother determining it was a betrayal of their Catholic values, thus making it her duty to stick with Mr. L whatever and however bad he might or might not be, or how personally miserable she was in the marriage. Despite it all, she forged ahead!!
That JHLB remains a practicing Catholic is intellectually fascinating as well as being part and parcel of her marrow deep psychological (and psychologically nutso) makeup. Women who twist themselves into pretzels to fit into patriarchal forms like the Catholic Church fascinate and repel me in equal measure; it is within the context of this pretzel that – along with shame, hypocrisy and fear of public exposure – led to JHLB’s betrayal of her only child.
Husband numero 2, Mr. B, was, you see, a sexual predator, and he preyed on JHLB’s child. Initially, JHLB did the right thing, contacting the authorities, pressing charges, moving the process along toward officially taking the sexually assaultive Mr. B to task. Then, as her pre-teen child was about to speak to the judge, JHLB told her to change her testimony, to say that she’d ‘made it all up’, which her daughter did. All charges were dropped.
This last minute Hail Mary pass request, this betrayal of her basic parental duty, her daughter told me, was actually worse than the molestation and sexual assaults, because her mother was her custodial parent, and her trusted primary relationship. That made perfect sense to me, the deeper betrayal being her mom’s. How could a mother do this? To avoid a second divorce or the public shame of Mr. B being credibly accused, potentially convicted?
But hey, don’t you worry, JHLB had a solution! Clever girl!! Donna and Walt would be so proud (not)!
Clever JHLB’s solution was to install a padlock on the inside of her daughter’s bedroom door, which required her child to remember to lock it every time she entered her own room, every night before bed, every weekend when she was napping, or studying or… whatever, in order to keep her step-father the fuck out. Nice, eh?
I wonder if any of her daughter’s friends or family members saw that padlock and asked, ‘What the heck is that about?’ I certainly hope so. Ironically, later on JHLB would adopt two boys whose dad was another sexual predator and family member not allowed to be around his own children. Boys would be safe with JHLB, right, given Mr. B was dead by then, and anyway, Mr. B was ‘just’ a predator of girls…!!!
One of my favorite novels is Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, in which a mother betrays a daughter in order to preserve her marriage to a step-father who rapes her child. It was – it felt – authentic and, while shocking, totally real. It is, in fact, Dorothy Allison’s fictional version of the true story of her own life. It is also a direct descendent of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which are chock full of parental betrayals of the worst possible kind. JHLB is a deeply flawed human, and – in my view – an untrustworthy, greedy, hypocritical, dangerous, self-important POS.
*Yes, yes she can. Ms. Ivins, who died in 2007 at the tender age of 62, was a Texan American whose nationally syndicated column was chock full of her wicked sense of humor, as well as her dedication to the rights of all Americans everywhere – even while (she worked in Minnesota, NYC and Colorado before returning to TX) her heart was 100% in the Lone Star State. Little known or remembered fact: while initially working for the New York Times, she wrote Elvis Presley’s obituary, in 1977. In case you’re wondering why that factoid stayed with me – well, hot damn, y’all – I love ELVIS!! She was assigned the obit because new on the job, with her Texas twang – and being female – they figured she was familiar with Elvis and all that jazz. She wasn’t, not particularly, but with this obit, she was launched.
Still, why run a bunch of quotes from a woman who, however famous and popular she was in her day, has been dead for almost 2 decades? Well, because this moment needs some Ivins’ prescient quotes and quips; also, because in researching politics for my next progressive opinion column, I came across a few quotes from Ms. Ivins that led me down a corridor leading to a whole new level of appreciation for her writing, her tenacity, her view of politics, and for her as a person.
All of the following are from her various columns or books. Here’s to you, Ms. Ivins, with renewed respect. Her wiki page is attached at the bottom if your interest is piqued.
This country is run by us, it is our deal, we run this country, we are the board of directors, we own it, they are just the people we’ve hired to drive the bus for a while.
I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag.
When politicians start talking about large groups of their fellow Americans as ‘enemies,’ it’s time for a quiet stir of alertness. Polarizing people is a good way to win an election, and also a good way to wreck a country.
The only problem was, the founders left a lot of people out of the Constitution. They left out poor people and black people and female people. It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. And it still goes on today.
I am not anti-gun. I’m pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We’d turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don’t ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives. (good gawd I love this one…reframing the argument humorously – genius!)
Rank imperialism and warmongering are not American traditions or values. We do not need to dominate the world.
We make the mistake of thinking that the political spectrum runs from left to right when in fact it is from top to bottom and the gap is getting broader every day…
One function of the income gap is that the people at the top of the heap have a hard time even seeing those at the bottom. They practically need a telescope. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt probably didn’t was a lot of time thinking about the people who build their pyramids, either.
This last one is me badly paraphrasing Ms. Ivins because I couldn’t find it anywhere (and then lost the original clip, my bad), after having heard it in an interview she did while journeying down my rabbit hole:
We all know shit runs downhill from the top to the bottom, and the people on the bottom, poor people, the disabled, the vulnerable – are drowning in it.