Hexed and Hacked
It started with a pair of heels clicking down the hallway of a dream.
I have a great grandmother I’ve never discussed here. She is a family legend and, like most family legends, a family shadow. She and I were never alive at the same time but she looks out for me like no one in my line but my mother’s mother Alice May, who died when I was 18.
This great-grandmother’s name was Rubenfire, which I learned long after I named my now-deceased kitty Ruby. Growing up I was only told that she was a very cruel woman who’d made a small fortune selling rags. Later I learned she was brave, charismatic, and resourceful, and that when she’d arrived here from Poland as a non-English-speaking teen, she’d done the only thing she could to support her children upon discovering her husband had started a new family in Brooklyn: She turned tricks, and eventually became a successful brothel owner in the Salem area of Massachusetts. Continue Reading →
The WTFery of ‘Whiskey Tango Foxtrot’
More than any other American film actress under fifty, Tina Fey is an old-school screen siren. In the 1940s — the era of Barbara Stanwyck and Judy Holliday; the era of dames whose appeal stemmed as much from their crackling brilliance as from their gorgeously irregular features — Fey would have been the queen of marquee. As it is, this Philadelphia native of Greek descent has been edging past Hollywood’s biases against grownup women ever since she sprang out of the “Saturday Night Live” writers room to deliver the Weekend Update in 2000. Now, in “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” she comes into her own like the librarian who whips off her glasses to reveal the beauty already obvious to anyone paying attention. Continue Reading →
Our Bodies, Our Tesseracts
So long as we still have memories, each of us eventually becomes a time traveler. When I walk down a NYC street, I can see how it looked 20 years ago as clearly as I can see the way it is now. And when I speak to someone I’ve known a while, I can see all the ways they once looked, talked, and felt as easily as I can see who they are at this moment. I’ve always known our bodies are time travelers–that they store every feeling and experience we’ve had and translate them into ailments and strengths. Lately I think our minds are, too. Einstein said, “The only reason for time is so everything doesn’t happen at once” but he was only talking about chronos, or linear time. In kairos, or soul time, everything does happen at once, and none of those things change unless spiritual progression occurs.