Suprise Me

Charlie leered at me, “Hey doll, did you pop out tonight?” Charlie was Charles Werner Moore, a much-respected director, actor, and acting teaching at Brandeis (though I wouldn’t take a course with him until the following year) and director of the first Main Stage show my freshman year at Brandeis. He never learned young womens’… Read More

How do you tell your teenage children that their father has died? Read More

I first wrote this story for the prompt “Finding Your Tribe” on March 14, 2020, just before the start of the pandemic, and added an addendum as Massachusetts shut down the next week, then came back last year. Our conductor, Rick Travers, starts every season (I joined this chorus 20 years ago) by saying the… Read More

The temptation that I didn't act on Read More

Planes, Trains and Automobiles was the first big-budget movie I ever did. Read More

Ever since I was a kid, I always dreamed about being someplace else. All my life I've dealt with wanderlust, and I have spent a lot of time feeling guilty about it. Read More

In the late 1960’s, I was asked to appear in front of my local Miami (Florida) Draft Board. The Board wanted me to defend my application to become a conscientious objector.  They were especially interested in quotes I used in my application.  The quotes were from Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller.  This novel had… Read More

      Rush hour is a daily ordeal, a gauntlet thrown down by urban existence. It is a time when the open road, a symbol of freedom, transforms into a congested, serpentine nightmare. The once-fluid asphalt becomes a parking lot in motion, a claustrophobic ballet of honking horns and overly impatient drivers. Beyond the… Read More

As part of the duck and cover generation, I despair that my legacy to today’s school children is a country in which they understand that there is no real safety as long as the gun culture persists. Read More

I have tried buying smaller, light weight purses to spare my back. But that will only work if I don’t overload them until they are bursting with essentials that I can’t leave home without. Or so I think. I’m going to inventory the contents of my smallish summer purse. Here are the items that are… Read More