The Milestone I Didn’t See Coming
I have two daughters, and one is an actress Because of this, she and her sweetie have worked at the Great Dickens Fair in San Francisco for… five? No, six years. First… Read more The Milestone I Didn’t See Coming →
Tilt!
Since my teens (possibly even before that, but the facts get lost in the gauze of time) I have occasionally fallen over. Often publicly. The first time I remember was… Read more Tilt! →
Let me call you… Mister
A friend mentioned the other day that she’d run into a novel set in the mid-19th century in which everyone addressed each other by their first names. All the time.… Read more Let me call you… Mister →
Walk This Way
I walk–more or less–the way I drive. I stay on the right, pass slower moving people in front of me on the left, and do a lot of passing. I… Read more Walk This Way →
Confessions of an Inadvertent Prescriptionist
So my daughter is home for the summer, bringing joy and great conversations and taking over my kitchen. I really enjoy both my daughters, but Younger Girl is such an emphatic presence in the house that you really know she’s here. And we talk. Oh my God do we talk. And there are some tics in her language that drive me a little crazy. Such as? “I’m really excited for this vegan dinner.” The way I understand my language, the sentence above suggests that my kid is excited on behalf of the vegan dinner, which… Read more Confessions of an Inadvertent Prescriptionist →
Parallax Views
There’s a lovely moment in The Avengers (the movie, not the TV series of blessed memory) where Black Widow and Hawkeye are on Park Avenue just below Grand Central Station, fighting off… Read more Parallax Views →
In Praise of Fanny Price
I have been doing one of my semi-regular Jane Austen re-reads. Every time I find new things: This time I was chagrinned to realize the extent to which certain film versions had overwritten Miss Austen’s original text in my mind–not necessarily to their detriment, but I was looking for a scene in Sense and Sensibility that turned out to be a clever Emma Thompson way of compacting a good deal of information. But the original Austen is still there on the page, and still smart and incisive and funny. So far I have… Read more In Praise of Fanny Price →
A Cautionary Tale or Two
When my older daughter was about three, we went to the park on a hot Spring afternoon. Usually I did not have her in a stroller, but because we were… Read more A Cautionary Tale or Two →