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On the 50th Anniversary of the Assassination- That Which We Dare Not Think
Posted: November 27th 2013 @4:05 PM
There probably isn’t an American over 55 years-old who does not remember exactly where they were and what they were doing at 2 PM on November 22, 1963. At this moment, of course, the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, was gunned down in the streets of Dallas.

Lest any American, of any age, miss the commemoration of this mournful anniversary the mass media has done its best to deliver it, front and center. This year alone there have been hundreds of new books, movies, TV shows, and newscasts on every conceivable platform, including the “JFK Twitter Takeover,” an hour by hour account of the event as if it was unfolding live, right now on social media.

While far more than half of all Americans—60 to 80%, according to various polls— do not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing the President, the vast majority of these pop culture recreations, including an alternate reality fantasy novel by Stephen King, follow the gospel of the Warren Commission, which has been accused of producing so many falsehoods that a number of them, such as the Lone Gunman Theory and the Magic Bullet Theory have become popular tropes which are synonymous with far-fetched ideas.

In fact, the assassination of President Kennedy attracts theories of conspiracy precisely because the most basic evidence in the record points directly to multiple shooters. Even the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, convened in 1976, concluded that there was “probably” a conspiracy.

The irony is that almost anyone who has presented a divergent opinion has either been ignored by the mainstream media or labeled a conspiracy nut.

Nevertheless, there are no shortage of them and figuring it all out is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with a blindfold on. You’ve got so many pieces you have no idea how they fit together because you can’t see the big picture.

You’ve got anti-Castro Cubans working with a factions of CIA that are furious Kennedy pulled the plug on the Bay of Pigs invasion. You’ve got members of the mafia who made a deal with old Joe Kennedy to help win the presidential election but felt betrayed when Attorney General Bobby Kennedy went after them in court. There are the Texas oil billionaires who stood to lose a fortune if JFK ended the oil depletion allowance. There are members of military intelligence who suspected that JFK was cooling to its commitment to the war in Vietnam.

And if you’re having trouble fitting all those pieces together there are people who say that one man did just that, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had the motive, the means, and the opportunity to mastermind the plot to kill the president. Johnson, according to a new book by a Washington insider, was about to be indicted by for financial crimes and ultimately dumped from the 1964 presidential ticket. In fact, the night before the shooting, LBJ purportedly told his long-time mistress, “After tomorrow those goddamn Kennedy’s will never embarrass me again—that’s no threat—that’s a promise.”

I grant how threatening all this is to believe, which is one reason why it’s so easy to deny. Scientists have long marveled at the human brain’s ability to suppress apparent danger.

And what could be more dangerous than a coup d’état –the overthrow of the government by a small group within the government. It’s preposterous. It’s outrageous. That stuff happens in third world banana republics, not the United States of America. You’d have to be nuts to believe something like that.

You’d have to think that as citizens we really don’t have a voice. You’d have to think that our government is run by higher powers than our presidents; powers with agendas of their own; and that if a principled president stood in their way, he could simply be rendered powerless…or eliminated.

If you can’t bring yourself to believe that there are forces within our government that will do whatever it takes to get their way…then you have to believe in a deranged lone gunman, a lucky marksman with a magic bullet…and then the world will be good again and we’ll live happily ever after.

I’m Ira Wood…and that’s not necessarily my opinion.

Matters of Opinion are Ira Wood’s short, personal, often rather odd takes on current events. They wrap up the WOMR News on most Fridays at 12:30 PM and are available as podcasts HERE. Feel free to email Ira to tell him what you think.
Remembering Howard Zinn on Veterans Day
Posted: November 27th 2013 @3:57 PM
Monday November 11 marks the observance of Veterans Day, the official holiday that honors people who have served in armed services of the United States. Since I never served in the armed services, it’s traditionally been a holiday about which I had absolutely nothing to say, or perhaps more honestly, a day about which I thought it best to keep my opinions to myself. I have nothing but praise for veterans themselves, as well as healthy helpings of sadness for their sacrifices and appreciation for their service. But traditionally the celebration of Veterans Day, and it’s sister holiday, Memorial Day, have been occasions marked by marching bands, eulogies, and patriotic rhetoric, a time I thought it best not to raise questions about war but to silently respect the men and women whose lives were often ruined by it.

But for many of us who stand in reverent silence at such occasions, there is often a very large and unmentionable invisible elephant standing right in front of us. Why, we never ask on these solemn rituals, are we not talking about the causes of the suffering and sacrifice, war itself, only the effects.

My reluctance to engage the topic is no different this year. I’ve never been to war. I’ve never been in the military so I avoid the issue entirely on days like Veterans Day because I don’t feel I have the authority to address it.

With that in mind, I thought I’d channel the thoughts and writings of someone who is eminently qualified to take on the topic, a veteran of world war two, and a friend of many years, Perhaps he was a friend of yours. His name was Howard Zinn. Always scholarly without being dense, always impassioned without being a scold, Howard’s writing always seemed to capture the essence of political situations with clarity. On the very subject I’m lamenting, he writes, that “Patriotism becomes the order of the day and those who question the war are seen as traitors to be silenced.” I would add, sometimes even by themselves.

Howard Zinn called himself “a eager bombardier” in World War Two and in spite of a what he refers to as a “bone deep hatred of war” he was “so anxious to get overseas and start dropping bombs that after his training in gunnery school and bombing school traded places with another man who was scheduled to go overseas” ahead of him. He felt the war was a mission of high principle for the rights nations to independence and self-determination. But after the was he began reading the history and started questioning of America’s own expansion through war and conquest: The Revolutionary War, which was not celebrated by native Americans, black slaves, or many American colonists who felt at least as oppressed by upper-class Americans as they did by the English.

Howard Zinn tells us that “the people who fight the wars are not the people who benefit from the wars.” This was certainly the case of the Mexican War, in which there were so many disaffected soldiers that General Scott woke up one morning on his final march on Mexico City to find that a full half of his army had deserted.

He reminds us that a lot of the people who volunteered for the Mexican War did so for the same reason that so many of the poor and working class people volunteer for the military today, because they hope their fortunes will improve as a result of enlisting.

In the textbooks, the Spanish American War was sometimes called “a splendid little war” because it lasted only three months. We did it to free the Cubans, Howard tells us, because we’re always going to war to free somebody. We expelled the Spaniards from Cuba, but we didn’t expel ourselves from Cuba.”

In the midst of the Civil War, another quote-unquote “good war” because the slaves were freed in the course of it, one part of the union army was fighting in the south while another was west, destroying Indian settlements and taking over Indian land. During the civil war, in which there were as many American deaths as in all other U.S. wars combined, more land was taken away from the Indians than in any other comparable period in history.

While Howard Zinn’s many books remind us of our country’s lack of innocence in war, he had no illusions about his own. He recalls a mission that he flew over France in the waning days of World War, in his own words, “unthinking and unfeeling, like a programmed robot.” Since the war was all but won, he suspects there one of the reasons for the massive raid was to try out a new weapon, which he later discovered was the first use of napalm in modern warfare.

So during veterans Day I’ll be suitably quiet, honoring the sacrifices of the men and women who went to war. But there’s way I’ll ever forgive the people who continue to send them.

I’m Ira Wood…and that’s my opinion.

Matters of Opinion are Ira Wood’s short, personal, often rather odd takes on current events. They wrap up the WOMR News on most Fridays at 12:30 PM and are available as podcasts HERE. Feel free to email Ira to tell him what you think.
Ruby Tuesday… Still I’m Going to Miss You
Posted: November 24th 2013 @8:21 PM
And in fact, if you haven’t yet seen Cape Rep’s production of Gip Hoppe’s Ruby Tuesday, make sure that you don’t miss it … it’s a wonderful evening out and a great performance.

The time is the not-too-distant future; Paul and Janine Carter live in the best of smart homes designed—and monitored—by iDisney, a kinder, gentler version of George Orwell’s Big Brother, along with their baby son, Paul Jr.

No, it isn’t an original premise … but what lifts Ruby Tuesday above every other dramatic dystopian vision is Hoppe’s Ionescu-like stream-of-consciousness monologues in which both Paul and Janine each indulge: the language is gorgeous and the delivery spot-on. Paul speaks of the “white-water feel of a finely tuned commute” and rhapsodizes about his “sperm of wonder, sperm of gold,” while Janine admits that she “takes refuge in the emotional turmoil of others” via television and wonders “why do I feel so alone when there are so many voices and faces in the air?” These monologues tend to be a little longer than they need to be, but Hoppe is easily forgiven as the audience drinks in the wry humor lurking in nearly every sentence.

As is consistently the case at the Cape Rep, the set design is original and wonderful, with a futuristic design that melds present decorative trends with a 1960s reliance on bright colors.

The storyline is predictable—but, again, that doesn’t seem to be the point of the play. The couple cannot talk to each other in an environment where telephones, tablets, television, and the house itself keep talking to them. They eventually come to admit—through the intervention of a third character—that religion is more than an archaic concept (“God doesn’t live in a post office”) and that at the end of the day the convenience of their lives may not justify the fear their controlled world generates.

Alison Weller and Matt Sullivan are excellent choices to play the Carters. Sullivan is goofy—and poignant when he is given the opportunity to reflect on his situation. Weller’s Janine walks a fine line between who she is and who she wants to be, and allows the audience to believe in her self-realization.. Darlene Van Alstyne is elegant and cool in her role as the disruptor of the Carter household, and Susan Winslow vibrates with energy.

Hoppe’s talent both as playwright and director are evident in Ruby Tuesday, and the Cape Rep has another winner with this off-season hit.
The Health Care Dot Gov Website – Did Anyone Expect This to be Easy?
Posted: November 1st 2013 @11:49 AM
This past week I found myself smack in the middle of the national zeitgeist: I signed up on-line for a health care policy. Even though Massachusetts has had its own healthcare exchange since 2006 the process was not without its headaches. I’m certainly no computer whiz, but after a weeklong series of back-and-forth e-mails and faxes, I was apparently one of only thirty-five hundred people statewide who managed to survive what critics of ObamaCare are billing as a government technological failure on the level of the Space Shuttle Challenger.

Although comparing a fatal explosion in space to a computer crash sounds cold, you wouldn’t know it for all the hyperbolic ranting on Fox News and in congress. And there is one similarity. Both situations can be attributed to the design failures of outside contractors working with a government agency that felt pressure to launch.

Having lived half my life in a world before personal computers were as common as toasters—in a long-ago, far-away world in which no one ever conceived of making French toast in toasters—I’ve always considered computers to be noting more than a nifty tool.

Are all books better because authors can write them with Microsoft Word? Are all movies better because you can watch them on NetFlix? Are bills cheaper because you can pay them online? Let’s be honest about this.

Certain things are always going to suck and buying health insurance is one of them. The first time I ever bought a health insurance policy I sat across the desk from a salesman who was either a pathological liar to too stupid to understand the fine print in the policy he was selling. Either way, my first and only claim was rejected because of a pre-existing condition.

So I don’t really know where the notion came from that signing up for a health care plan was going to be simple, sort of like driving through a tollbooth with Easy Pass; or frankly anything other than a big pain in the butt.

Is it easy to sign up for a PayPal account? Is it easy to get an on-line upgrade of your phone from Verizon? Frankly I’d rather have an ingrown toenail removed than go through that again. And by the way, surprise, surprise, one of the government contractors on the HealthCare.gov website was Verizon’s Terremark unit.

So for any of you searching for health insurance who are actually considering signing up online, I would have to rate the process as somewhat harder than ordering an on-line pizza but a total breeze compared to getting phone support for my computer.

The biggest glitch—since I use a PO Box instead of a street address—was actually getting the site to grasp where I live. In Wellfleet, this is a problem every pizza deliveryman has to contend with. But because the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was not Microsoft and they had people answering the help lines whose first language was not Hindi, this was a problem that was eventually solved.

Now I know there are people whose health care policies were mistakenly cancelled and that’s frightening. I know there are people whose computers froze.

But on come now, the two operable words we’re talking about here are government and website. Two words that when linked together promise about as much quality as fast and food.

Has anybody ever paid payroll tax on their computer? Or tried to correct a mistake on their social security account? When I was finally able to renew my truck registration on Registry of Motor Vehicles site I felt so proud I ran around my office pointing to the sky like David Ortiz after hitting a home run.

ObamaCare is going to make life tolerable for a lot of struggling families, a lot of poor children, and a lot people with pre-existing conditions.

But it’s being delivered by a partnership of the same type of nitwits who brought you the War in Iraq and iTunes for Windows. And if there’s one thing high-tech companies and government have in common it’s that they over-promise and under-deliver.

So for now my only advice is, eat an apple a day, wait for the update, and be wary of getting a virus, because that might be something neither you nor health care dot gov could recover from any time soon.

I’m Ira Wood and that’s my opinion.

Matters of Opinion are Ira Wood’s short, personal, often rather odd takes on current events. They wrap up the WOMR News on most Fridays at 12:30 PM and are available as podcasts HERE. Feel free to email Ira to tell him what you think.
The Disloyalty Diet
Posted: November 1st 2013 @11:37 AM
I don’t know about you but I’ve always been on some kind of diet. I was a fat kid and my mother bought grapefruit by the case. She weighed every item she served me on a plastic scale and had a local handyman drill a padlock on the refrigerator door. She emptied my pockets for loose change before I left the house and cruised the shopping plaza because a neighbor kid told her I sometimes bought a hot dog and devoured it by the dumpster in back of the deli. She ran her fingers around the waistband of my pants to make sure they weren’t getting tighter–to this day I opt to drip rather than tumble dry, having more than once been the innocent victim of shrinkage—and clicked her tongue in disgust when the clothing salesman led us past the regular sizes to the elephant’s tent of the children’s wear department: the table marked Huskies.

I was weighed for times a week, always showing far above the Metropolitan Life Average Weight for Children (of India? I wondered) and driven bi-monthly to a diet doctor who prescribed amphetamines. Before every meal I choked down a black pill whose street value today is six dollars.

Throughout adulthood I’ve tried Atkins. The Zone. Weight Watchers. South Beach. None of them work without a boring hour of exercise. Weights. Pull-ups. Rowing machine. And the harder you push, the more you’re likely to sprain some muscle, and have stop for while you heal, and gain back everything you lost.

But I think I’ve hit on the best diet ever. I mean EVER. It involves sports but you don’t have to break a sweat. And you only eat what you want.

It all stems from a recent study about whether a football team’s winning or losing effected what fans ate the day after the game.

Now, in past commentaries I’ve mentioned the behaviors that psychologists call birging and corfing. These are acronyms. BIRG stands for Basking In Reflected Glory. It’s opposite is CORF, whose letters stand for Cutting Off Reflective Failure.

People are Cutting Off Reflective Failure when they get so upset with their team losing that they’d rather shut the TV off than watch Tom Brady get sacked. They’re Basking In Reflected Glory when they watch the highlights again and again after a team win.

But get this. According to this most recent study, football fans saturated fat consumption increased by almost 30% following a loss and decreased by 16% percent after a win.

In fact close games led to even more high-fat pig-outs. It’s all because we identify with our teams and when we feel our identities are threatened we compensate by eating high calorie foods. Now the fact that disappointed fans tend to get drunk, beat up on their domestic partners, and have heart attacks have all been documented but this study was the first to explain why the sizes of Chicago Bears jerseys start at Extra-Extra-Extra-Large.

But the key here is the effect on fans of winning teams. Fans of winning teams feel good about themselves. They pass up three-cheese nachos for a shrimp cocktail.

You’ll be happy to know that this phenomenon is not solely American. According to the New York Times, the experiment was duplicated in France, a country not known for fried pork rind binges, but the results were the same.

So how do we apply this to our own diets? Simple. Just ditch the losing teams and root for the winners. I don’t know how many Boston Red Sox fans had to pack away their skinny jeans and replace them with overalls in 2011 when the Sox finished dead last in the standings, but I do know that John Lester, Josh Becket, and John Lackey weren’t the only ones stuffing their faces with Popeye’s Fried Chicken. We all got fat when the home team tanked.

But how easy would it have been to switch our allegiances? Would rooting for the Yankees have been so bad if it meant dropping your LDL cholesterol level by 30 milligrams? And here’s the best part…you can participate in sports without getting up from the couch. No personal trainers. No membership at the gym. No stationery bicycles or push-ups every morning. You don’t have to do anything…but be disloyal.

This past summer my fitness plan comprised a baseball cap for every team and an MLB Extra Innings package with the Cable Company. As soon as one team started losing I changed my hat and my channel and voila, instead of craving a half gallon of chocolate fudge chunk ice cream I went for a cup of plain yogurt. Hey, okay. I know it sounds disloyal, but at least my pants fit.

I’m Ira Wood…and that’ my opinion.

Matters of Opinion are Ira Wood’s short, personal, often rather odd takes on current events. They wrap up the WOMR News on most Fridays at 12:30 PM and are available as podcasts HERE. Feel free to email Ira to tell him what you think.
State Senator Dan Wolf: The Tragic Fall of the Uber Mensch
Posted: November 1st 2013 @11:22 AM
There is certainly no one interested in politics on Cape Cod who wouldn’t agree that the biggest story, as well as the biggest political drama, on the Cape this summer was the candidacy of state senator Dan Wolf for governor. Wolf was not only a favorite son, a generous patron of the cape’s non-profits, a progressive voice in the legislature, but a mensch, a genuinely good guy. His decision to call off his campaign this week because the state ethics commission chose not to grant him a conflict-of-interest exemption was received with an intensity of disappointment as strong as the wave of elation that greeted his announcement to run. For progressives of all stripes the news was a tragedy. For a novelist like me, in fact, it has all the elements of a very classic tragedy in the tradition of Aristotle.

Not to bore you with Theater 101, an Aristotelian tragedy involves a drama concerning a character’s downfall with incidents arousing pity and fear, and ending in a katharsis of emotions. All these elements are apparent in the story of a progressive businessman who attempts to shake up a state government that is ultimately responsible for his demise. Who didn’t feel pity for the candidate, and even more for ourselves? And who didn’t fear that if a guy with Dan’s drive and qualifications couldn’t get on the ballot, we might never see his likes again?

But the element that really drove home the tragic implications of this saga was what Aristotle called Hamar-tiah, sometimes translated as tragic error; an element in the character of the protagonist that causes him to bring on his own downfall. To my mind this tragic error had nothing to with Dan Wolf’s weakness. Quite the contrary, the tragic error may have been the strength of his belief of the fairness of our system.

According to the Cape Cod Times Dan maintained that he was blindsided — or tripped up — by the Ethics Commission’s ruling. He said, “My concern is that the system inherently now has trip wires in it that you wouldn’t necessarily see from the outside as you step in.”

It was a kind of blindness, or tragic error, that has befallen many truly good politicians. Mike Dukakis comes to mind when he was blind-sided by the Willy Horton ads of George Bush and Lee Atwater, his pit bull campaign manager. Ed Muskie. Al Gore. John F. Kennedy. There’s a long list of really good-hearted people who simply didn’t see how low politics can get, or the lengths to which entrenched insiders will go to foil the competition or the campaign of a plucky newcomer who wants to change business as usual.

Some people thought Dan Wolf’s best recourse was an appeal to Superior Court but according to the Cape Cod Times Dan said he might drop out of the governor’s race and resign his Senate seat rather than take his case to the courts.

This bespeaks a man who honestly thinks he is right. Someone who feels that if he makes his case in the sunlight, that reason will vindicate him; that our just political system will find its way out of the darkness. Unfortunately, a man who may have been somewhat blind to the way that system really works.

The final element of tragedy is the catharsis, the experience of deep emotions that make us wiser and able to change. How will we change as a result of watching the saga of Dan Wolf and the Ethics Commission?

Will we become cynical? Will we knuckle under to the entrenched state machine? Will we lose the “anything is possible” attitude that makes Cape Cod so unique? I don’t think so.

I think Dan Wolf will stay in the senate. I think he’ll build a state-wide reputation from his good work. I think he’ll earn the respect of the establishment politicians and off-Cape voters. I think this tragedy will open his eyes to the elements that want to thwart real progress.

I do not believe the candidacy of Dan Wolf for Governor is dead. I think it we will see it again in the future, and everyone knows, what doesn’t kill you just makes you stronger.

I’m Ira Wood … and that’s my opinion.

Matters of Opinion are Ira Wood’s short, personal, often rather odd takes on current events. They wrap up the WOMR News on most Fridays at 12:30 PM and are available as podcasts HERE. Feel free to email Ira to tell him what you think.
Finally Proven by Science: Messy People Are More Creative (but didn’t you know it all along?)
Posted: November 1st 2013 @11:04 AM
Are you a messy person or a neat person? Do you make your bed everyday with tight hospital corners or just smooth out the blankets? Does your couch, on a lazy Sunday afternoon, resemble bleacher seats at Fenway after a twi-night double header? Have you stopped noticing the cobwebs on the ceiling rafters? If you can answer YES to any or all of these questions you qualify as messy. But don’t take offense. That may be a good thing, at least according to the New York Times, in which a recent article says that messy people are not only more creative than their more fastidious counterparts, but also more likely to break with convention and try new things. There’s some good news for you orderly clean beans, too. Apparently you’re more likely to be good Samaritans and follow a healthy diet. Well, I say bully for you, and you probably also iron your underpants.

Today I’m talking about us creative types, people who use their cars for the same purpose women use their pocketbooks and whose desks, even if they’re located in a cubicle, always seem to look like they’re next to an open window. We know that clutter makes our minds race with brazen ideas and take intellectual risks, or at least I know that now. Before I read the article, I just thought I was a slob.

The article cites an experiment by psychologists at the University of Minnesota who assumed that since order and disorder are both prevalent in nature and culture, that each environment confers advantages for different outcomes. As you might suppose they thought orderly environments lead people toward tradition and convention, and disorderly environments encouraged just the opposite, breaking with formality.

They devised three experiments to prove their point. In each experiment the subjects were asked to sit in identical rooms—identical except that one was neat as a pin and the other looked as if it had hosted a fraternity party. The same problems were presented to the subjects in each experiment, choosing healthy snacks versus junk food in the first; coming up with inventive uses for ping pong balls in the second; and in the third, a choice between a classic fruit smoothie or one advertised as more exotic. The results of all three experiments showed that those people surrounded by mess overwhelming thought outside the box and had cravings for fun foods.

Now I would be the first to question any so-called experiment that bases its findings on ping pong ball ice trays and guava kiwi smoothies. In fact, I’ll admit to skepticism about psychology experiments in general. Almost all of them are performed on students in American and European universities, for one thing, and according to an article in Slate magazine, this means the subjects are weird, that’s W-E-I-R-D, which is an acronym for westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic…in comparison other human beings around the world. A much-publicized experiment on early sexual relations, for instance, filtered out anyone who had been sexually abused or homosexual. Not exactly a universal sampling.

But I do chose to embrace this experiment because it speaks to a running theme in my life. Which is…well…a messy house.

To whit. My wife and I are both writers. We both love gardening…an activity that turns our kitchen into a working farmhouse.

We have five cats…meaning we spend more time on litter boxes and hairballs than polishing the silver. Our offices are forests of books and snail mail, printers, cords, computers.

Both of us would much rather do our writing than vacuum, dust, scrub, sweep, or polish. We lived together for six years before we got married because neither of us wanted to be the wife. We dutifully hire people to come in and clean the house, but like a newly mowed field it begins to revert to its natural woodland state within hours.

It’s not that I don’t like clean, quiet, uncluttered places like Buddhist centers and museums. They’re great to meditate in. They’re great to look at paintings in. I love meeting friends for drinks in a swank midtown hotel bar and browsing the stacks in a college library.

But none of those places inspire my creativity. For that I need a cat on my lap, a stack of newspaper clippings, a few empty coffee cups, open books, a lot of pillows on the floor, oh… and cobwebs. There’s nothing like cobwebs to really get my juices flowing.

In fact, the word messy is archaic. It’s been replaced it with creative. You don’t have to believe me, it’s in the New York Times.

I’m Ira Wood…and that’s my opinion.

Matters of Opinion are Ira Wood’s short, personal, often rather odd takes on current events. They wrap up the WOMR News on most Fridays at 12:30 PM and are available as podcasts HERE. Feel free to email Ira to tell him what you think.
Hurricane Sandy One Year Ago
Posted: October 29th 2013 @9:18 AM
photos taken by Georoid Dolan of Scream Machine
my neighbor

hi dears this was my post on www.rossirant.com
a year ago…seemed fitting to repost it here one year later

these days thank god, i am warm and safe but never going to take a hot shower, a warm bed and a dry home for granted again

be well and be safe

The Sandy Aftermath (one year ago)

Greetings from zone A
My dears I can’t even tell you what this girl has been through this last week
I watched cars floating on my block, our basement took 15 feet of water, we had no heat, power, phone, internet, hot water for a week!
We still don’t have hot water and honey this sh-t has been freezing!!
Talk about a cold shower!
Downtown, the east village, lower east side, everything below 39th street was dark. It was the strangest feeling looking uptown and seeing all the lights, looking downtown and seeing black.
And my dears, I thought crossing the street in ROME was scary! Crossing the street in Manhattan with no traffic lights?!! Sh-t… at night, close to suicide!
but we waved our flashlights, prayed and stepped off the curb.
Today I am throwing away all my paintings, photographs, beloved possessions and so much more from my basement storage that I did not think would be affected because it sat on top of concrete slab that is nearly four feet high!
15 feet of water!!! Still can’t believe it. I thought I would go down the stairs to see the basement with a few feet of water, but the water was over the top stairs and a foot high in the first floor too!!
It’s been rough, but here are the good things…watching my neighbors (even one, who hasn’t exactly been friendly to any of us), band together to help each other, watching the entire hood share and help each other..watching people donate food to each other, lend generators, feeling more love and kind-ness then fear and anxiety all around me.
New York City really does have a heart and you feel it when disasters strike.
It reminded me of how kind everyone was after “911″
We really needed a bright light at the end of this terrible tunnel and we got it Tuesday night.
I couldn’t even get my TV to work until after the announcement, so I knew he won by the cheers in the street, but honeys, my dears, “Thank god OBAMA won!”
It’s the first happy moment I have had since October 29th when the east river flowed over avenue C down our block and into our lobby!!!
Please lord, heal our pains, save our basements, save our economy, keep our children warm, give us a hot shower one day soon and help OBAMA to be all that he can be.
To the Republicans, take a lesson from the east village this week and put aside your partisan crap, step across the aisle and help the democrats help this country. You didn’t want to help OBAMA get re-elected by voting yes to anything he wanted to do to help our country, well now he got re-elected anyway, so vote f-king yes already, this country can not afford blue and red, just like my hood could not afford US and THEM!
We are all in this together!!
Ode to Norma Holt
Posted: October 5th 2013 @8:02 AM
I met Norma many years ago when I rented the smallest apartment I’d ever stayed in. We are talking little! I once almost dis-located my shoulder trying to use the bathroom. But it had a view, wow what a view of the Provincetown bay. It felt a bit like a cocoon. I rented the little place for 8 years and wound up doing some of the best writing and painting of my life there.

On the pier next to me a lot of folks rented by the week, some owned, some rented for the summer. There was a seasonal renter of several years, a woman named Norma Holt.

On one my daily walks on the bay beach one afternoon, an old woman shouted at me, ”When you going in the water? Walking is fine but go in the water!”

I tried to argue, I wanted to clear my thoughts on a walk, the water was cold, bla, bla. She wouldn’t hear any of it and simply demanded I go for a swim. Once she got me to agree she also demanded I hold her hand and help her in the water, then after she submerged help her out of the water, then help her to her chair, then help her up the path to her tiny apartment in the back.

The next day I discovered that she had also enlisted her neighbors Andrew Sullivan and his boyfriend Aaron (now husband) as her dutiful solders to cart her here and there, feed her and entertain her.

“One simply does not say no to Norma,” Andrew explained.

For the rest of that summer, when Norma would catch site of me, she would wave me over to sit with her, swim with her, help her to and from the water. I have to admit there were days I hid behind the railing of my deck so I could have a little quiet time, but mostly I got a kick out of her.

I had no idea who she was, that she was a talented photographer of many decades and had lived a life that should be written about in novels and film scripts. She never bragged. I had to find these things out from others.

As the summer went on I took her out to dinner to The Squealing Pig and she told me what it was like to be in an inter-race marriage, I think it was in the 60’s or possibly 50’s I don’t recall, but certainly during a time that making that choice was dangerous. She felt she had much in common with the gay community trying to march to their own drum and not fit the norm and she was right.

I would escort her, by trotting along side her electric scooter, as she cruised down commercial street to T.J. Walton’s gallery for T.J.s artist’s brunch, which really was just an excuse to sit around and worship Norma.
On the way there, she would ride in the middle of the street holding up traffic and when they would beep, sweet little old lady looking Norma, would turn around in her chair and give the finger, with both hands!

Then she would spin off laughing at the shocked tourists.

I went with her to the Schoolhouse gallery in town and looked through the collection of her photographs. Michael the gallery owner knew I was Norma’s pal so suggested I ask her if she wanted to give me a discount.

I held up a darling photograph she’s taken of a sweet little old lady sipping a cup of tea totally naked and asked, “Norma can I get a discount on this?”

After a summer of buying her groceries, taking her to dinner, helping her to and from the water, I was kinda thinking she might make a gift of it to me.

Norma looked up at me sheepishly with her beautiful eyes and said, “Why on earth would I do that?”

You gottta love her.
Next to Normal is Next to Amazing
Posted: September 24th 2013 @11:27 AM
When you think “musical,” you’re probably thinking about something uplifting, especially when we’re talking about the Cape Rep Theatre, where shows like Avenue Q and Spamalot have been recent musical successes.

Next to Normal? Not so much.

The action opens as wife Diana (Nikki Van Cassele) prepares her family—husband Dan (Matt Ferrell), daughter Natalie (Chesley Jo Ristaino), and son (Matthew Corr)—for a seemingly ordinary day. It’s only when Diana, giggling, starts making the family’s sandwiches on the floor that the audience gets the idea that All Is Not As It Seems.

And that was one of the play’s lighter moments.

Diana has a long history of mental problems, triggered by a trauma that occurred 16 years ago. When her condition worsens despite her pharmacopeia of Mother’s Little Helpers, her new psychotherapist, Dr. Madden (Marty Brent), suggests ECT.

Meanwhile, the couple’s “invisible” daughter Natalie, worn out by her mother’s thoughtless neglect, slips into her own depression despite the rather adorable efforts of her new boyfriend Henry (Christopher Sheehan) to engage her in love and life.

Tom Kitt’s music—winner of the 2009 Tony for best score—and Brian Yorkey’s book and lyrics are an impressive collaboration, as the Pulitzer Board acknowledged in its remarks that the show “expands the scope of subject matter for musicals.” And the songs are extremely clever, there’s no getting away from that—but, honestly, there was a sense that this might have made an absolutely terrific 90-minute musical; by the time the second act came around, things were starting to feel a little redundant and one found oneself thinking, “Yeah, yeah, I got it.” Two hours and twenty minutes is too much time for this particular story to be told.

None of that, of course, is the fault of Cape Rep, and the actors/singers delivered their lines and numbers with energy and—occasionally—inspiration. Chesley Jo Ristaino’s Natalie is close to perfect, a teenaged girl caught in the throes of her own hopes and fears, trying to be the good child to two parents who barely notice her, and taking her own hesitant steps forward—and back—on her way to figuring out her place in the world. Ristaino never overdoes, never falls into pathos or too much drama, and her voice is clear and pure and exceptionally beautiful.

Matt Ferrell has a challenging task: to humanize a nice guy who lives in denial and whose life revolves mostly around his crazy wife. His codependency to her illness could easily make him into a caricature, but Ferrell resists and his Dan is fully human, baffled by his inability to make everything all right for his family, trying to do the right thing while having no idea what that might be. His voice is grand by itself but even better when blending with others and doing tight harmonies.

Van Cassele and Corr, as Diana and Gabe, have the most obviously dramatic roles in the play, and one can forgive them both a tendency to go a little over the top with their characters. What that means, of course, is that they’re not always emotionally and vocally in synch with the other actors, but the power and intensity they both project is impressive and just this side of overwhelming.

And as is often the case at Cape Rep—perhaps in a nod to its typically older audiences—the musical accompaniment is just a shade too loud.

Those issues aside, Next to Normal is next to fantastic. The stage direction is brilliant; the sets are perfect—that’s another Cape Rep staple—and are used cleverly and unobtrusively; and the moments of laughter serve to underscore rather than alleviate the exceptional difficulty of living with a mental illness.

Go see it!

Next to Normal plays at the Cape Rep Theater, Brewster, until October 13; find out more and reserve tickets at caperep.org. Photos courtesy Robert Tucker, Focal/Point Studio.