There is Hollywood and then there is the book before Hollywood gave it a treatment.

My maternal grandmother in Omaha, Nebraska lived in a big house with a basement, an attic, and a dining room on which she hung commemorative plates from travels to tourist meccas. … Read full post »

"If fascism ever came to the United States, it would be wrapped in an American flag." - Huey Long

 

My parents were not hippies.   I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s.

My father grew up dirt poor in Southern Arkansas where his father did hard… Read full post »

My Open Salon blog is subtitled “So They Know About Mom” for a reason. 

My very personal presence in this forum was intentional.  Now my life is cached and archived in cyberspace and darned if I did not die.  Oops.  Kinda hard to hit the delete button no… Read full post »

I have never seen any footage of the planes flying into the Twin Towers on 9/11.

At first this was not on purpose.

On 9/11 I was in my office without a TV or any kind of media prepping to teach composition classes at a university three weeks into a new… Read full post »

Frank Indiana’s post today got me to thinking about my least favorite phrase in the English language.

“I feel your pain.”

Damn Bill Clinton for making that phrase popular. 

I understand that President Clinton meant to say he sympathized, empathized, and wanted to help. … Read full post »

Here is my wild theory.

I think Tiger Woods no longer wants to play golf and has not wanted to for some time.  Perhaps his wife is trying to give him an out by asking him to step away for awhile.

I know a little about running away from… Read full post »

He does give a damn. Thank you Alan Grayson.

Nothing I write is going to add to this.  I am glad he was on Letterman.  There needs to be a direct response through the media to counteract the nastiness perpetrated by others in the media. Letterman has populist appeal. I don't know how he can get this short simple message… Read full post »

This the "mom-with-a-bad-attitude-on-a-soapbox" letter I regretfully send in some variation at the beginning of EVERY school year.  I don't allow my kids to sell Girl Scout cookies either.  Don't get me started on car washes by high school organizations in which teenage children in bikinis… Read full post »

Sometimes I don’t know what to tell my teenage daughter about men and about the world.

 I have great damage to undo because I stayed for many years in a marriage with a man who resented rather than loved me and acted out that resentment every day.  Her norm… Read full post »

What I am Reading

 Donald Gardner Stacy lives and works in China and writes excellent fiction during our nighttime.

http://open.salon.com/content.php?cid=61964 

 Will Humes writes in The Least of These about how hard it is be a good pastor.  And he likes his coffee.

http://op… Read full post »

November 6, 1984 

With Nudity and an Uncertainty that I May Have Accidentally Voted for Reagan 

Around 6 a.m. on the morning on the day of the presidential election I woke my husband David up crying in pain.  I had an abscessed nerve in a decayed tooth that was calling… Read full post »

After a day at the M.D. Anderson hospital I’m off to the Miami Book Fair.  No more cancer.  No more tests. And no more doctors appointments for six months. 

I’m free ;0)

My friend Andrew and I are going to many readings. Well Andrew is only go… Read full post »

7:50

Watching local channel 13 instead of CNN or MSNBC is odd.  This is the channel on which Joe Biden was interviewed by the blonde female reporter with strange GOP talking point questions that went viral last week.  It's a real conservative station.

Shocking  . .. Oran… Read full post »

Sometimes as an icebreaker at the beginning of the semester I ask students to write stories about themselves and to share them with their classmates. All of the stories but one has to be true. The game is to find the lie.

So all but one of the following tales is… Read full post »

I voted at 2:30 this afternoon at the local library.  It took less than 15 minutes and the pollworkers were incredibly professional and helpful about voting by

• distributing absentee cards to sign while in line to speed up the process
• reassuring voters that there were forms one could fill
… Read full post »

June 14, 2007

I was in New Orleans to see labor organizer (LO) during the week. He was nervous about my being in the city alone and could not get down from northern Louisiana in St. Charles where he was organizing a plant protest march until Wednesday. His instructions were… Read full post »

People from Arkansas announce their citizenship on first meeting.

President Bill Clinton is one of the most famous men in the world. He could identify himself in many ways on first introduction. However, last month when he spoke at the campus of the University of Central Florida in support of Barack O… Read full post »

The full quote from the second episode of Alan Ball's True Blood is a commentary on the Civil War by a vampire who "turned" at 13-years-old during the Civil War on  his impressions of that war.

". . . just a bunch of dying starving boys killing each other so the worst… Read full post »

I spent much of today thinking about my former in-laws' refrigerators.  Both barely survived the depression but due to WWII and the GI bill  became quite wealthy before they died.   They invested in Miami/South Florida real estate that much appreci… Read full post »

Chemofog

Pigeon-toed.  That was the doctor’s diagnosis when I was around Tyler’s age of four.  So I had to wear clunky black-and-white heavy corrective shoes that caused much derision on the playground.

My dad gave me a bicycle when I was five.  That first day w/… Read full post »