At twilight, when the sky was a faint wash of blue, my mother sometimes caught me sneaking out of our apartment for one last game of hide-and-seek with neighborhood pals.  “It’s not safe, after dark,” she’d scold, shaking her finger at me. “But mama, plenty of kids are arou

The thief was furious when he found a 4-year-old child strapped into the back seat of the car he’d stolen.  His response was to slam on the brakes and reverse direction.  Finding the mother newly emerged from the grocery store with a gallon of milk, he scolded her for leaving her

I used to think I was a reasonably informed person, but President Donald Trump has taught me what passes as information can often be fake.  Take the banana, for example. In the ‘60s and ’70s, it would never be mistaken for a work of art. But since Trump has been in office, realit

I love Russian literature.  Much of it is pessimistic, of course.  If a bright future lies ahead, it will come in another lifetime.  Certainly, that’s the view of Anton Chekhov. (Click) At the very least, I find this point of view eccentric.  A Russian countess in Dostoevsky’s

In the 1960s, Peter Weiss stunned the world with his play, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. The story depicts a French asylum in 1808 in which the inmates re-enact 

The circle of coffee gals at the retirement center (Blog 5/3/2017) had already arrived for their morning break when I entered their magic circle, sputtering a few words about the appalling leadership in the country.  A  94 year-old women wheeled up with her walker to join us.  Barb

I read recently that Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan, had signed into law the right of a man to beat his wife. (Yahoonews.com) He did it, he explained, because the order was in accordance with Sharia law. Apart for the immorality of using religion as a pretext to abuse women an