When I was twenty-five (1970) I stumbled off a Greek ocean liner named the Queen Anna Maria at the port of Athens, Piraeus, Greece. I was meant to spend a month on a romantic, free-spirited Greek island with friends – Hydra – but ended up spending two consecutive years there, and have been returned since(…)

Not nose drops. Not chocolates. Not cashmere sweaters. Not roulette. Not porno. Not showering. Not hand-wringing. Not nit-picking. Not hair-twirling. Not pistachio nuts. Not long drives along the Oregon coast. Not $25 foot rubs.  It’s affecting my brain and body, it’s compulsive; has disrupted my social life. Question: If left untreated over time, will it(…)

Following, a paragraph taken from the home page of the dazzling blog SunnysideHanne.com: “Part of blowing so damn hard on the embers is to bring back the tastes of childhood, my mother’s expatriate Danish cooking, my Father’s Eastern European specialties like his sweet Tzimmes and half sour tomatoes, my Aunt’s traditional Danish farmhouse fair and(…)

Today – St. Patrick’s Day – against my own resolve, I dashed up to 45th Street and was lucky enough to cadge  a ticket to see Glenda Jackson in Albee’s Three Tall Women, a dull American rumination on womanhood, death, greed, disappointment that ends with the lines ” .. You’ve got to keep battering your(…)

Had Vivien Leigh lived into her eighties, she would have looked like my friend Carol***  does at eighty-five. Carol, who grew up in Manhattan, with an Irish mother and Scottish father, who ran a boarding house on the Upper West Side, met me today at my corner so that we could lunch together. She carries(…)

Once the freshly washed laundry has been pulled from the washer and carried across the laundry room, it gets stuffed into a dryer. No big deal. Just now, though, as I loaded wet teal-blue sheets, underwear, dishtowels, socks, cloth table napkins and more, hand-over-fist, I gripped what felt like a scissors buried inside a twisted(…)

It seems that a few of our so called ’emotional supports’ and/or ’emotional comforts’ are turning into strangers; some with, some without, consent. Service peacocks, turkeys – out of the blue – (willy-nilly) just now forbidden on airplanes, on trains, cruise ships, in halfway houses, gyms. Also ‘under review’ for possible expulsion – ‘hedgehogs, ferrets, insects, rodents,(…)