Elizabeth Taylor – screen legend, world-renowned beauty, Oscar-winning actress – has passed away. She died today, of congestive heart failure, at the age of 79. Like most who recall her in Butterfield 8 or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, we think of her exquisite face and voluptuous body, her smoldering sexuality that heightened extraordinary […]
News
Yesterday I was doing some editing and talking on the phone, when I was told to look at the news. A man had taken hostages at the Discovery Channel just outside of Washington, DC. There was a gun, and possibly explosives. I got off the phone. I put on CNN. I watched, and then had […]
Father’s Day Gifts (Good, Better, Best)
Good gifts Digital SLRs. Flat panel TVs. Exotic watches. Cordless drills, wrench sets, any kind of tools. Grills, golf clubs, silk ties. These are good gifts, aren’t they? Maybe even fabulous gifts? This used to be the lexicon of my month of June – whatever the latest and greatest gifts might be – for the […]
Moment of silence
Last evening I wrote in the quiet. I watched a movie on cable. I read, then wrote some more. And settled slowly into a rhythm of 24 hours of silence. Strangely peaceful silence. Everything in me unwinds, finally, after a week of being on my own, in this observation of an hour of silence, and […]
Scoring the Decade: Your 10 Years in Review…
How will you welcome 2010? Are you thinking of your New Year’s celebration, and getting ready to party hard? Or are you contemplating the past decade, assessing the ups and downs of ten tumultuous years on the world stage? What about your own ten years in review? As you prepare to greet the change in […]
I Cannot Pretend Today
There are betrayals of flesh and blood and they are the worst betrayals. I am not alright: My sleeping is pocked and marred again and not by dreams but by insufficiency. The result is a veil that positions itself between my deepest thinking self and the formation of words, the processing of numbers and their […]
Bad news, a martini, a moment
The voice startled him. “I have bad news,” he said. This, in the wake of the recent loss of his sister, and a friend, and another battling a life-threatening illness. He must have felt his entire body stiffen at those words, though they were uttered by a waiter in a family restaurant, on the first […]
Loneliness. NOT a Dirty Word.
Loneliness is painful, but the shame we feel makes it worse.
More real than celebrity. A friend’s passing.
First Ed McMahon, then Farrah Fawcett, and then Michael Jackson. Each celebrity death, eclipsing the next, with the media storm over Jackson taking on a life of its own. As we knew it would. Yes, each of these three celebrities contributed to their industries in significant ways, impacted lives and memories of different generations, and […]