Suprise Me

Playing with Fire As a child I spent summers with my family at my grandmother’s small Catskills hotel.  (See My Game Mother,  My Heart Remembers My Grandmother’s Hotel , The Troubadour,  Hotel Kittens, The Cat and the Forshpeiz and Our Special Guests) One summer a family with a son about my age –  we both must have… Read More

Close your eyes and think of baseball. Read More

My cousin Annette and I took our grandparents to see Fiddler on the Roof performed at Detroit’s beautiful Fisher Theater. The Google machine tells me this happened prior to the show’s Broadway debut, so it was either in 1963 or early 1964. We were lucky to see Zero Mostel in the role of Tevya. In… Read More

Caitlin, my daughter, spent several months in the Intensive Care Nursery as an infant. She needed open heart surgery and ended up spending several months recovering, having setbacks, and recovering, before she was finally able to come home at around four months of age. The ICN was full of babies who were too small or… Read More

Usually I write the story first and then look for a song for the title. This time I picked the song first. It is the third week in January, the week between Martin Luther King’s birthday and the ending of the Obama Administration. I feel like it is the last week before our country descends into… Read More

My friend Hirth died five years ago, today. I don't think he'll mind if I bring that up. Whatever I did, he was down with it; whatever he did, I was down with him. Read More

  Supermarkets, those sprawling temples of consumerism, have been a fixture in our lives for over a century. From the first Piggly Wiggly in Memphis to the sprawling mega-stores of today, these retail behemoths have witnessed countless triumphs and tribulations. While most of our supermarket experiences are routine and unremarkable, there are those occasional encounters… Read More

I’ve always loved going for interviews.  I know how to shine at an interview. And I almost always get the job or the date. I like the rush of ‘winning.” But I don’t always want what I get. Fresh out of U of Michigan nursing school, I followed my med school grad husband to Oakland,… Read More

For someone who loves to write, being a terrible speller used to be my Achilles heel. Read More

My mother graduated from The Ohio State University in 1935. She wanted to study modern dance in New York City and was forever grateful that her father cashed in his life insurance so she could have a year to do that. She studied with Doris Humphrey, whose most famous student was José Limón. Before heading… Read More