Recently, the Amputee Coalition of America (ACA) produced five public service announcements, unfortunately titled “InspiretoElevate,” to raise awareness of limb loss. In them, several people with prosthetic legs are profiled. Three of the five are athletes, one is an...
This morning I had a startling thought: even my ears are old. I guess I’d been noticing it for a while—the crease in my earlobe that wasn’t there before. But it never registered as a sign of aging. Apparently, it also might be an indicator that I’m at greater risk for...
What is so striking about the so-called pro-life crowd is that they value fetal cells more than actual living beings. And somehow feel they are taking a moral position—the highest, holier than thou...
Today I darned a sock. Well, not a sock exactly. A support stocking. (If I’ve already admitted to darning, I’ve already revealed my age). I didn’t do the best job. Nowhere near the neat woven stitches my mother and grandmother were capable of producing. But I...
Looking for a book for my granddaughter, age four, I came across My Busy Day, part of the Wimmelbook series. It appeared very similar to the German books (which are large-format wimmelbuchs) called, in English, All Around Bustletown. I knew about those because my...
I have no direct connection to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but I read something today in a New York Times op-ed that made me feel I understood something about her. Both our mothers died when we were teenagers, and events connected to mourning them influenced our feelings...
Yesterday I watched a couple of videos on how to make face masks and downloaded a pattern. I rummaged through my closet and found some unused material on the top shelf and pulled out a couple of new dish towels from the back of the pantry. Despite scolding from our...
This weekend I went to see a local production of The Tempest. It was far from the best Shakespeare I’d gone to, but also far from the worst (that would be, hands down, the Glenda Jackson King Lear, although Jackson does not deserve all the blame.) But one strikingly...
Yesterday I went to see the premiere of Twyla Tharp’s "Minimalism and Me" at the Joyce Theater in New York. The first part of the show was a retrospective, narrated by Ms. Tharp, that detailed the history of her first troupe and her (genius) method of choreography,...
The other day I saw an unusual theater piece by Jos Houben, a Belgian performer and teacher, entitled “The Art of Laughter.” It was actually a kind of master class in slapstick during which Houben explained his theory of why we laugh at certain physical shtick. His...
Last week I went with my daughter to a conference on Transracial Adoptee Identity. She is adopted from China and is planning to develop, for her college senior thesis next year, an identity model for transracial adoptees (TRAs). The two presenters at the conference,...
After reading a positive review, I watched the first two episodes of Patriot, a new web series streaming on Amazon about a reluctant American spy. I was sort of enjoying it until I was struck by how many “humorous” references the program made to disability. Apparently...
Forced into this life on February 13, 1949. Left on purpose on August 22, 2013. --Obituary in the New York Times Reading the New York Times this morning I came across a review of a documentary, Left on Purpose, about Mayer Vishner, a former Yippie who committed...
We are back in Utrecht, a city my husband and I have grown to love after several visits. Our younger son now lives in a nearby town and we are visiting for his 30th birthday. Today we went on the Dom Under tour. The Dom is the 14th Century church tower, the tallest in...
Recently, people from my neighborhood organized a Kids March as part of a growing, if piecemeal, movement aimed at resisting the policies and prejudices of the T… (let’s just say “new”) administration. One of the children’s signs declared “Giraffe Power.” Despite...