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Blood in His Tracks (Indigo Grownups)

August 25, 2017 in Age Matters, Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Ruby Intuition, Sabboytical, Spirit Matters

I have come to accept my sadness as holy. I don’t mean to fetishize depression. I don’t even think the great grief I experience is depression–it’s situationally appropriate and does not rise up to wall me from my day, duties, you.

But I think of my sadness—this heavy, grave stillness—as holy because it is true and because, after all these years, I am grateful to feel even when it is very, very hard.

As a young empath my daily prayer was to not stop feeling. I worried that I’d grow as numb as most adults, that I’d stop registering the sorrows and struggles and triumphs of bugs, birds, plants, people–of every soul quietly hurtling on its forcefulm fateful path. I felt everything so deeply that it made me cry in fast food restaurants and plastic playgrounds paved over meadows, at birthday parties where the parents didn’t seem happy their kids had been born. Oh, Lisa, she’s so sensitive. That’s what they always say, isn’t it, when we can’t block out the miracles and savagery of everyday life.  Continue Reading →

From the Department of Extremely Shallow, Let-Them-Eat-Cake, Barely-Tolerable-Before-Rome-Was-Burning Blog Posts

August 22, 2017 in Age Matters, Snapshot, Style Matters, TV Matters

I can tell my grand love affair with this natural brown-grey hair color is over, oooover, we-need-a-new-word-for-over* because yesterday at the beach I caught myself squeezing lemon after lemon on my hair to “lighten it just the tiniest bit.” Bring in the big-gun chemical blonde STAT, please; I’m over looking like the earnest, granola-baking, leftist bumpersticker-sporting Cambridge mothers of my 1970s childhood. (Hey, I warned you re: shallow.)

*yep, to make matters worse, I am quoting Sex and the City Season 3 here.

Jerry Lewis Needed the Applause

August 20, 2017 in Age Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Film Matters, TV Matters

It’s hard to believe Jerry Lewis is really dead because he survived so many health traumas he seemed indestructible and because he’d been around since Moses so why die now? Normally I’d not comment on his passage beyond that because when you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything. (That voice alone, Jesus!) But it occurs to me that, by allowing himself to be cast as the most odious version of himself in the distinctly avant-garde The King Of Comedy, he not only let some extraordinary talent off the leash (Scorsese, De Niro, Bernhard), he created the prototype for basically half the films and TV shows we see today. Until TKOC, shows based on comics always sweetened their subject up; it’s not like The Dick Van Dyke Show showed raging alcoholic DVD blotto drunk, or The Mary Tyler Moore Show showed MTM spewing the retrogressive garbage she spewed off-camera. Would we have Louie, Seinfeld, The Larry David Show, The Larry Sanders Show, Master Of None, Funny People, Difficult People, 30 Rock–the list of meta comedies about churlish comics is endless–without Jerry Lewis as our sacrificial lamb? For better and worse, the answer is no. As he liked to point out: “He had great success being an idiot.”

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy