Tugboat Annie

I remember the first time I met Annie. My parents were looking to move in to a new house across town after living in the same house for twenty years. We were invited out to a ranch home on the city limits on a cold November night in 2005. I’ll never forget being greeted at the door when we first arrived. A woman in a red bandana with twinkling blue eyes and a big smile welcomed us into the house and gave us the tour. I’ve never seen someone so accepting and welcoming before. It was like she had known our family for years. She truly was happy that we came to see her house. Of course, … Read more »

My Mother Wanted to be Betty Boop

What is this thing between mothers and daughters, this primitive compulsion to make totems of each other so that we can appear before each other’s eyes as the larger-than-life-caricature of everything we hate and fear? Pendulous breasts, jutting buttocks, lidless eyes, the teeth of the devouring monster spitting blood through lips that close over the helpless prey. Hi, mom. Hi honey. That you? Yeah, it’s me, is that you? Then we kill the creature, and we’re done with it. Until the next time, when it can rise up and be killed again. —Mary Gordon

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My mother wanted to be a dancer. In the living room when I was a kid we danced to “Stop In The Name Of Love” by The Supremes … Read more »

And it's not over yet.

He'll tell you he knew he wanted to marry me when I got lost and walked into the kitchen instead of the bathroom at Joseph's Pizzeria. As I shuffled back into the restaurant, hoping he hadn't noticed, he watched me and smiled and just - knew.

For me, it was earlier in the night, when he called to say he was outside of my apartment. Actually, he was standing across the street - he'd never been there before. He didn't see me right away and I stood there for a second before getting his attention. He looked different than he had before. We'd seen each other off and on as children and teenagers, but something had changed in Nathaniel since the last time we … Read more »

When The Dance Becomes the Dance

When the Dancer Becomes the Dance
Donya Feuer Oct. 31, 1934 – Nov. 6, 2011

On my 40th birthday a true legend died.

A few years ago while I was working on my dissertation “Pure Artistry: Ingmar Bergman, the Face as Portal and the Performance of the Soul” Harvey Lichtenstein at Brooklyn Academy of Music, a man whom I didn’t know personally but who knew I was interviewing various of Bergman’s collaborators, encouraged me to contact Donya Feuer in Stockholm. I came to understand that in the Swedish and Norwegian dance worlds, at least among the members of those Nordic countries’ cultural intelligentsia and to some extent also in the U.S., Feuer had become something of a legend due to her mastery of … Read more »

Rescued By The Osmonds

Being stuck in a dirt-poor family with a devout Mormon mother and an explosive, absent dad wasn’t what I had in mind for my life.

Between daily home church sessions to save our souls, regular trips to the church welfare office to beg for food, and irregular visits from my dad that often ended in screaming fits, kicked-in walls and broken furniture, I had reached my breaking point and started fantasizing about a way out.

At age nine, with nowhere to run, I adopted a daily mental escape ritual that consisted of locking myself in my attic room, laying down on the stack of mattresses that constituted my bed, closing my eyes and dreaming about my real family--the Osmonds--who would soon come to … Read more »

Ode to my mini-van

Today, I traded in my silver Toyota mini-van with a dent in a rear panel and 40 bumper stickers all over the back of it for an “almost new” used Toyota Camry. The Camry is a sea green, blue color, “aloe green” they call it. It is not a “mommy-mobile” like the mini-van and now that my youngest is 7, we are all ready to say good-bye to the cheerios all over the car. But, like any kid, I struggle with the desire to let go of who I was and grow into the person I was meant to be.
I am an accountant by trade. I was a CPA for 20 years. I am a practical, organized person as a result of some success … Read more »

Looking down at my younger brother’s feet in the beach parking lot, I thought such whiteness existed only in the dead.

SHELLSHOCKED

Looking down at my younger brother’s feet in the beach parking lot, I thought such whiteness existed only in the dead. It was a reminder that he didn’t get outdoors much, and this made me, an avid open-water swimmer, sad.
Fred “went away” to the Willowbrook State School for the Mentally Retarded at the age of four and from the age of twenty has resided in a group home for people with disabilities. Mom and Dad were his connection to “typical” life until their deaths. And I was always his hero. But probably because of a childhood of Sunday visits “to take Fred out,” I focused on career as a young adult and we became acquaintances. Becoming his guardian in my 50’s, … Read more »

Surprise revolution took away my cartoons

I was in Rangoon to atone for my sins.

It was the Fall of 2007, the Jewish High Holidays, and I had gone to Burma to do some research on the small Jewish community that had been there for about 200 years. I planned to celebrate the High Holidays with them, observing Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement for the first time in about fifteen years. I did a little sightseeing too—a temple that held a hair of the Buddha, the 12th century ruins of Bagan, the floating villages on Inle Lake, a monastery filled with cats trained to jump through hoops. There was nothing political about my purposes in Burma, yet politics was in the air.

Around the time … Read more »

Middle School Lesson on Life

In sixth grade I had a nerdy, homely teacher for first period—Mr. Pennington. He wore diapers. Naturally, as 13-year-olds do, we made fun of him. Sadly, I participated. Most people whispered and giggled and some did so blatantly to ensure he could hear. He never flinched.

One early morning the class had pushed all of the desks to the perimeter of the room and everyone sat on the floor drawing, cutting, coloring, and gluing decorations for one holiday or another. We all chatted and laughed loudly at who liked who and who we didn’t want to sit with at lunch while Mr. Penninton stood precariously on a desk—one foot on the seat and the other on … Read more »

I Just Want to Be Successful

July 22nd, 2011. San Diego, CA. Comic-Con is now on its second day. I woke up in the morning with a backpack filled with items and a head full of dreams rushing through my head. “This could be it DJ, you could meet the person that is going to change your life”, I kept thinking to myself.
Around the summer of 2010 I had an epiphany, and that epiphany became my sole purpose of living. This girl I met in my sophomore year of high school had a lot in common with me… We both loved celebrities, and I was addicted to E! News; from watching E! News, it was evident from there that I knew I wanted to become a celebrity correspondent/TV host … Read more »

Never going to sell yogurt again

Sandy floors that need to be mopped, fruit that needs to be chopped and machines that need to be filled. That is the glamorous life of a yogurt girl, and unfortunately for me, my current reality.
Ever since I lost my first tooth I’ve been saving up. So its no surprise that I’ve had a job since it was legal. My first job was probably one of the worst jobs in existence. I was a sign twirler. I was 12 years old and spun a bright yellow sign that was bigger than me for a local grocery store. From there I moved up, I started helping my dad out at the many restaurants he worked at, bussing and hosting. But I wanted more, I … Read more »

august train

The train had been delayed 9 hours. i had spent the last two months in the northwest, traveling with the basque man, my love, my true north. i was not looking forward to leaving, nor returning to my working life, so this extended travel delay was a mixed blessing. it was interrupting the inevitable good-bye, which would take me nearly a thousand miles to the south, to work, to the desert dry place where i live. no more clove-scented-by-wild-rose air, or wide open lush green wilderness or nights spent next to another.... scrub brush and heat and dust and dirt awaited me at the other end... but for now, nine more hours to savor michael...

eventually, amtrak arrives and i … Read more »

“Your bra is not supporting you.”

My mother talked to me about sex only once. I was ten-years-old. She was in the middle of giving me a piano lesson in the rumpus room of our Long Island suburban home. Bubbles of sweat covered her top lip.

“Are you feeling OK, Mom?” I asked.

“There’s a film in health class tomorrow on menstruation. Read this pamphlet,” was all she said.

That’s why, three years later, I became confused when my mother asked me to join her in being part of a market research study conducted by a man testing the quality of his company’s brassieres. How could she be comfortable with this?

The first time … Read more »

The Ballad of Mrs. Ed Flynn

Two days before my wedding, my mother pulled out a circa 1969 National Geographic magazine she had set aside for my future husband, who is an airline pilot. The cover story on the future of transportation featured predictions about supersonic transport, automated ticketing, and buses and houses that fly. Happy for a distraction from the wedding, Chris and I flipped through the magazine to the last page, and that's where we met Mrs. Ed Flynn.
The ad for Mazola cooking oil and margarine featured a woman nuzzling her husband as she offered him heaping bowl of salad beneath the tag line, "Tonight's the night Mrs. Ed Flynn starts Polyunsaturating her husband." Poor Mrs. Ed. Here she was undertaking a revolution in home economics and … Read more »

Fifth Grade Strings

"What'll it be?" Mrs. Rosenthal had the voice of a giant muppet.
"Violin...I want to be a violin."
"WHAAT?" Her arms flailed dust around the musty old music room, "You want to be a violin?" My face reddened.
Yes! I wanted to say. Yes! I want to be the violin! I want to be shiny and pretty and high-pitched and held up. I wanted to be Marcy. Marcy was all light and spring-smelling and baby-pink. Marcy was a violin; a first-chair of life, held up high by the fifth grade. One subtle nod from her and the whole world started playing. Maybe if I played the violin I would be important, too; not all lank and gawk and gap and grease like I … Read more »

Merda, She Wrote

It's hard to say for sure, but I'm fairly confident I could have been engaged to be married tonight, had I answered differently.


It all started this afternoon as the Doraville train pulled up to the platform at Five Points. There's always a frantic rush for open doors and empty seats that commands your attention and mad ninja skills. At a minimum, this usually involves elbow-jabbing, body bashing, a clandestine foot trip - to be completely unaware is to risk an incident similar to the Pamplona bull run. I had an eye on my door before the train even rolled to a stop, had already assumed the ready/set/lunge position, accompanied by the surge of adrenaline that precedes the possibility of an air-conditioned seat … Read more »

Love Risks But You Go First

“Faith in Friction. Steep Creep. Baby Bottom Bowl. Everyone has heard of the Slickrock Trail. I mean, not everyone everyone, but practically everyone. At least everyone who mountain bikes, and then some. The trail, all 12 tortuous miles of it, is like a mantra among bikers, a sort of against-all-others gauge. Slickrock, they ask, as climbers might ask K2 or Kilimanjaro, or as kayakers might ask Cataract Canyon or Zambezi. Slickrock is, in a word, both beginning and end, first and last. Yes and no.” – Slickrock Article Contributor


It was our day to try Slickrock and day six of our travels in Moab, UT. We had already tackled Cataract Canyon on a four day, three night whitewater rafting excursion and had hiked … Read more »

Why My Dad Is a Badass

Every summer, like clockwork, my parents would take my sister and me to Galveston Beach, about an hour down the coast from our home on the Texas Gulf shore. Like everything else when you are raised by Chinese-American immigrants, these joyful excursions came with a catch: Dad, in his infinite wisdom, insisted that my younger sister and I wear bright orange and yellow life jackets while swimming. You can imagine the embarrassment a ten-year-old feels wading knee-deep into the ocean with a life jacket strapped to her. Horror of horrors should a classmate espy me in my pathetic getup.

It’s not that Dad didn’t know we were great swimmers. He was the one who footed the bill for swimming lessons every year. But … Read more »

Split Decision

I moved to Memphis, TN last July. I left the small Virginia town I'd grown up in and bounced back to many times over the last decade. I was thirty-two years old and believed I was as lost and broken as a person could possibly be. I thought the move would fix things.

Fix things it didn't. Shortly before moving my boyfriend broke up with me. I had planned on his support, long-distance as it might be, and couldn't imagine doing it without him. As the movers packed my stuff into a truck, I sat on the front porch, sunglasses pulled tight over my face, crying. I should have been focused on the fact that the movers were drunk and seemed to be … Read more »

Growing Up Outside Da Region

I was born outside “Da Region” in rural Northwest Indiana. I must admit I had no idea there was a “Da Region” until I moved away - at which point I learned that people in far off places such as Florida and Washington were intimately familiar with this legendary place. “Da Region” is loosely defined as that area outside Chicago where the mob finds it convenient to eliminate their “excess baggage” - if...yous know what I mean. It’s close enough to make for a pleasant drive without being so close as to stink up their beloved Chicagoland.

This all makes it sound like quite an exciting place, but from immediately outside this nebulous region it was not so much interesting as...well...the precise opposite … Read more »