How to Run a Disorderly House in 1890 Early New York was littered with prostitution in the late 1800’s. On the streets and in the Bawdy or Disorderly Houses as the cops designated them, prostitution was a booming business. The brothel business abounded not merely because of lust and lawlessness, but because it was [ Read More ]
I had a very hard time with my Mother, her words mostly wounding, her anger terrifying. It was my father’s kind and loving heart that saved my childhood and my spirit. So when Mother’s Day comes round a tug of war ensues. I feel my heart segue-ing not to memories of my own childhood but [ Read More ]
Shared history has immense power. I didn’t know how much until my divorce. It wasn’t only my future dreams that vanished with my husband, but the comfort of shared history that had been far more a source of strength for me than I’d realized. We were the same age, so we shared the same jargon, [ Read More ]
I’m in love with my dog. There’s really no other way to express it. He’s a former pound-puppy, rescued from the Humane Society at 5 months, now grown to 120 pounds of pure, unadulterated love and devotion. When Dakota went off to college five years ago, and my nest was disturbingly empty for the first [ Read More ]
I’ve been having an imaginary conversation with my heart lately. Not the physical heart exactly, although I admire its pluck and constancy enormously. But the metaphoric heart of me that loves, not necessarily wisely, but pretty well, and that has taken a lot of hits over the years. It occurred to me one day, while [ Read More ]
I confess to feeling slightly foolish blogging about Titanic, but the phenomenon of Dakota and her pals going to see it in Imax 3-D – for their 34th lifetime viewing – set me to pondering what on earth could have precipitated that kind of devotion to a movie. OK. In the interest of full disclosure, [ Read More ]
You can’t grow up to be a writer of love stories, if you aren’t an incurable romantic. Despite my own history of picking lemons in the Garden of Love – and oxytocin notwithstanding – I’ve found that I need to believe in true love. I have seen it – not often – but enough to [ Read More ]
Ever wonder why women have sex and think they’ve fallen in love, while men have sex and think they’ve just had sex? I may have stumbled onto an answer worth passing along. I’m not sure I can affect anything in the interaction of the genders by making this information public, but if it could simply [ Read More ]
I wanted to love and be loved forever. I wanted to grow old with the man I loved. Like Yeats with Maude Gonne, we’d love the sorrows of each others’ changing faces, and it wouldn’t matter one whit if we weren’t young and beautiful anymore, because we’d laugh together at the losses and infirmities, and [ Read More ]
“Language instead of tears. Anger instead of pent-up misery. Action and change instead of acceptance and self defeat. A warrior instead of a victim.” —Nellis Wong, Poet, founder, the Women Writers Union I was married for twenty years to a man I loved far too much for far too long. It never, not even for [ Read More ]