That's me on my first day of boarding school, a highly unusual place for a Jewish girl from Long Island to have ended up.  It was 1980 and I was 16, clearly with absolutely no interest in impressing anyone with the way I dressed.  None of my former classmates can remember/…

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Walking into my weekly prison workshop I never know what might potentially trigger certain reactions in the inmates or what will lead to off-course conversations (always the best ones.)  From my almost 2-years of doing this, I know going in that in the course of 45-minutes, I will walk away with/…

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Every time I change jobs (which has been quite a lot) I joke with my friend Mark that I'm going to change my entire look.  None of my new co-workers would know that I've never worn a headscarf, false eyelashes and a fake tan.  His first question is always "Who do/…

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My best friend is a junkie. Crystal meth has tossed his brain into unrelenting chaos. It has jumbled his lobes and pathways into amorphous masses in need of a fix. It has made him think that a young mother and her child recently sitting next to him on/…

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“So with the time we have left, tell me about your background, the key players in your life growing up.â€

Fuck. Here we go.

It's been 5 years since I stopped seeing an amazing therapist who I had seen for years. I wanted to start seeing someone again, someone new, someone who/…

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I was already 10 minutes into my weekly prison class when a white woman stormed in in a huff, muttering so we all could hear that she was supposed to be released that morning but… Read full post »

With the return of “American Idol,†I’ve been hearing that tired cliché about people being born to be a star, possessing a God-given talent causing their parents to notice something in their child, apparently the second they were born, that they… Read full post »

I’ve recently realized that there is a very real distinction between one’s past and one’s demons. The past is what you can learn from but tuck away in a place, sometimes revisit with fondness and oftentimes with regret (I don’t buy into the theory that we shouldn’t regret the things/… Read full post »

A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson


Lately, when certain people have noticed that I was getting close to having 700 facebook friends they would say things like “Those aren’t real friends,†or “You can’t possibly know all those people.†What/…

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In my prison class last week, as has been happening a lot lately, the inmates led us all astray into a spin-off conversation from my usual writing workshop exercises. Truth be told, I love when this happens because I end up learning more about them in a more candid way… Read full post »

Last week Michele Obama, our country’s First Lady, turned 48. I’m 47. I’m ½ a year younger than she is and she’s married to who could be argued is the most important man in the world. First Ladies used to look like Betty Ford and Barbara Bush.… Read full post »

I follow a brilliant blog written by a man named Robert Bruce who is reading (shockingly quickly, I might add) what Time magazine chose as the top 100 English-Speaking Novels Since 1923 (The blog can be found at 101books.net) There was a rather heated discussion about Lolita and i… Read full post »

My bi-weekly 45-minutes leading my prison writing workshop are the best 90 minutes of the month. When my 10-yr old knows that I’m going she always says “Tell the ladies I say hi!†The second I walk out the door at the end of the class, I call my husband…

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 “It’s kind of like drinking the beach,” my lovely and way-too-young- to-have-had-ANY–experience-with-colonoscopies coworker warned me.

 “Sounds awesome,” I said. 

For about twelve years I’ve had these random, double-me-over stom… Read full post »

I spent a lot of time alone as a kid. My siblings are significantly older than I (8yrs, 9yrs and 16yrs respectively) and I was often left to entertain myself within an eerily empty and quiet house. It was this freedom (and boredom), that lead me to explore the/…

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I’d stand, leaning on the hot metal counter, filling in little bubbles with a blunt golf pencil ordering the greasiest most fattening food to my heart’s content from the poolside snack bar. The college student working the grill never judged me while passing me my cheeseburger, fries and/…

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When I first saw the commercial for the item advertised above, I thought it had to have been a spoof. Clearly, some inventor somewhere knew that there were Americans who needed more than the invention of the century, the Snuggie. If the low-budget ad agency had the/…

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I knew something was amiss when my brother, no more than 24 at the time, appeared at my high school in his bright orange Toyota Corolla, mid-week, at the end of the school day. He worked in Manhattan and lived in Queens so his sudden appearance made no sense./…

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I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,
When he beats his bars and would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings…

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When my mother committed suicide somewhere between Christmas and New Year's Eve, 1985/86, someone made the decision not to tell her mother, who was about 90 at the time. This was a woman who watched 4 of her six children get taken away to concentration camps, witnessed as her…

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