Ahoy!

I’m exhausted. I admit it. Plus, most everyone I know is exhausted too. The nonstop “hive brain” of social media, the tweets too tart,   the Facebooks too far, the TV ad infinitum.  InstagramInstagramInstagram. It’s all just too, too much.  I remember reading as a child that the average human only uses 10 % of his brain — even geniuses. That said, even if I approached that benchmark, my unused 90-95% is bone tired and the minority in use even more so. Like the android Data in “Star Trek”,  if only I had an off switch. I love life - my life and life in general. I love my husband. I love my family, friends and field of work. I love the power and beauty of words and the passions they express and the wisdoms to which they aspire.  Lately, however, I have fallen into the trap of (as the Emperor says to Mozart in the film “Amadeus”) “too many notes.” Too many words. Too many opinions. Too many outrages about which to be outraged. I’m worded out. Pol...

A friend of mine — a mentor, really —  now sadly deceased -- used to say after Gay Pride Parade # 5434: "I'm so over the rainbow" as in "been there, done that - got the t-shirt, move on." I admit, I was beginning to feel that way too, but today -- actually, since Trump's election -- I've changed my rainbow tune. We don't need less "Gay Pride" we need more, and by more, I mean more people: gay,  non-gay, trans, bi, straight, black, brown, immigrant, poor, frightened and afraid - EVERYONE and ANYONE that feels threatened (which should be pretty much anyone except straight white men who espouse 'Christianity') by the Trump Administration. Today's "Pride" March was its usual polyglot of colors and creeds and agendas. But, today, I realized, while the catalyst and theme may be LGBT, the reason for the march was very red, white & blue Americana: a burst of laughter and humor and bawdiness and celebration in the mid...

Blood and Water “Are you too good to join the Army? Who do you think you are? I never went to college.” After 40 years, the words still sting: big brother reaction to my little brother excitement at university acceptance. “Who do you think you are?” I worshipped my brother: at 15 years my senior even more of an imposing idol than most “big brothers.” He taught me to swim, and once when I fell in the pool before that lesson — promptly sinking to the bottom — he dove in and saved my life.  He gave me my first car and then took me to a snow-laden parking lot at Willow Lawn Shopping Center to show me how to survive a skid: “steer into the swerve, not against it. If you jerk the wheel too hard, you’ll flip the car.” Two years later on a rainy New York State Thruway driving to college, my beloved brother-bestowed-car hit a nail and blew a tire.  “Steer into the swerve,” and I did — terrified — but survived. My bother saved my life — again. “Are you...

An Uncomfortable Art The hypnotic music from my DC days — my 20s / the ‘80s — drew me across the expanse of galleries at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA): Bronski Beat’s “Small Town Boy” — a melancholic anthem for a generation of young gay men seeking love amid the loneliness of AIDS in that dark ruin of a Reaganesque era.  I walked closer until a red curtain warning of “graphic content” stopped me from instant entry. Once behind the curtain, a wizard of MoCA’s permanent collection confronted me: the 42-minute-long photo-with-music montage that is Nan Goldin’s “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” (1983 - 2008). I stayed for every minute — for every often disturbingly yet always intimate image. I kept wondering — how did she get these images, these brutally honest, often ugly but somehow hypnotically beautiful snapshots of gritty humanity? The soundtrack rolled on and I was left strangely moved. In another gallery, an even more unsettling  display: “Chromatic ...

“We must flee, as we are now in the clutches of a wolf,” said then Cardinal Giovanni di Medici in 1492 upon the election of the notorious Rodrigo Borgia as Pope Alexander VI. As this was a period during which papal enemies often took unexpectedly ultimate swims in the Tiber (including Borgia’s own son some years later) flee Medici did, eventually to return and become a rather wolfish pope himself, Leo X. Since November 9, 2016,  I have often recalled that quote: obvious to me — and I believe, to most thinking, humanist people — that Trump was a singularly dangerous wolf. Like a feral canine, he lives only to eat, kill, mate and survive. And like a lupine predator, DJT leads a pack of lesser, subservient wolves. Unfortunately for the United States — and the world — many voters (for and against) saw in Trump an aging dog in sheep-killer clothing: all bark and no bite.   Alas, after almost a year-and-a-half since 11/9, Trump has proven (as if anyone who had followed his...

Happy Birthday Grandma (The Tradition of the Calendar Towel) by David Perry, written at sea aboard "Crystal Symphony" March 31, 1998 A century ago today, near a small farming town called Sontag, in Franklin Country, Virginia, in a farmhouse room lit by kerosene lamps and warmed with generations, an amazing woman was born: My grandmother. 1898. How that year always fascinated me. I would ask again, and again "Grandma, what year were you born?" She would take the pins from her mouth - held there while she sewed on some dress, shirt, pants or blouse for a family member, friend, or client - and tell me. "1898." Exotic it always seemed to me, this loving, living link to another century. Every Christmas morning the entire clan could gather at Grandma Hoard's or "Aunt Mildred's" as she was known to my cousins. There, I would sit at her feet - proudly guarding the tree - and hand out the various presents that cousins and aun...

January 22, 2018 By this point in the calendar, the Holidays have faded from the rear-view mirror of memory. The first three-day weekend of the year has paid tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and given everyone a brief “whew”: an extra day to digest the reality of 2018.   By now, meetings are being set for the months ahead, and ads for Memorial Day will soon start appearing. We are solidly in the midst of an annus novus.  We humans need time to let reality sink in. The reality of 2018 took three weeks to settle over me – in part due to a nasty flu which descended upon my body and my sinuses on new year’s eve. The reality of Donald Trump: that has taken a year. This morning as I awoke with the dawn, for the first time in weeks, my flu seemed to be in retreat. The reality of Donald Trump: not so much. In the previous year, there has been much made about “normalizing” Donald Trump,   as if somehow accepting the reality of his existence is to make him normal. I ...