Lea Lane
- Location
- Florida, USA
- Birthday
- August 26
- Title
- freelance writer/editor
- Bio
- I've been around the block (more like around the world). I've played and loved and lived an unconventional life in conventional trappings. I've been a corporate VP, worked with foster kids, acted in an Indie ("Nurse 1"), was on Jeopardy!.
I'll write just about anything, from speeches to comedy sketches to feature articles. I've been managing editor of a travel publication, authored six books, including Solo Traveler:Tales and Tips for Great Trips (Fodor's). I consider OS my home, but also blog on Huffpost and The Daily Beast. I've contributed (mostly anonymously) to everything from encyclopedias to guidebooks.
I was divorced late, widowed early -- and dated lots -- and I survived a scary illness. After being happily, peacefully solo for many years, I just started a serious relationship.
I founded and still edit www.sololady.com, a lfestyle Website for single women. I'm truly grateful for each precious day, each well-earned wrinkle, my family, my cat. Truth, laughter, friendship. And now this blog -- on this wonderful site!
MY RECENT COMMENTS
- “We are here for
you.”
9:21PM - “I wouldn't care if you
were a fry cook. It would make
you
even ... hotter!”
5:33PM - “Like most of us, he did
some good things and some bad.
And
standing against the
I…”
3:34PM - “Yes, you have full-blown
OS addiction. Eat some carbs,
take a
walk every half
hou…”
3:27PM - “So often those goals are
as fortifying as the soup. The
will
to live is so
strong…”
3:21PM
Lea Lane's Links
- Some of My Fave Posts
- You Caught Me, I'm in Love
- To My Sister, On a Big Birthday
- My Man in Rio
- My Birthday/Blogiversary
- My Mad Men: When My Bosses Were My Lovers
- Julia (and Other Famed Chefs)
- New York's Secret High: The High Line
- Losing a Dream, Losing a House
- A Nice Jewish Girl Named for a Racetrack
- A Conehead at the Fair: A Summer Tale
- Anne Frank Would Have Been 80
- Did I Really Just Tell You That?
- My March of the Penguins
- Becoming Invisible
- I Got Published in The New Yorker
- Elizabeth Edwards, Joan Rivers: Two Moms
- The World's Most Colorful Neighborhood
- Birth & Death: The Circle of Life
- Magical Light in the Slot Canyon
- Six Months: Waiting for the Blood Test
- Ode to My ... Tweezer(s)!
- I'm Not Who You Think I Am
- New, Dramatic Polar Photos
- My Surprising Talk With a Naked Actor
- When a Post Goes Viral
- Why I'm Alone
- Ballsy Politics (Literally)
- Media Vultures on Death Watch
- A Ramble in Ireland
- Alone on a Cliff
- My Reality TV Addiction
- "Broccoli" Obama
- Carnaval in Colombia
- Kate Winslet and Other (Drama) Queens
- Watching Greenland Melt
- My Valentine Lover, 2006
- Fear of Flying & My Near Misses
- To Heather: My GPS
- Ode to a Groundhog
- My Four-Part Antarctica Saga
- Parallels of JFK & BHO's Inaugural Addresses
- My Scary Dream
- Lobbying Obama in the Lobby
- My South Beach: Hot and Cool
- My Life in 100 Words
- New Year's Resolutions I Won't Be Making
- 25 Things About Me
- One Snowy Dud, One Sexy Stud
- If You Don't (Really) Celebrate Christmas
- My Gender Bender, Victor-Victoria Cruise
- How I Wound Up in Claus Von Bulow's Apartment
- To Odetta
- Racing at 150 mph!
- My Late-in-Life Love
- Quarantined on Thanksgiving
- 101 Words: He Never Calls, He Never Writes
- An Ugly Duckling OS Tale
- To My Neighbor Hillary: The Former Candidate
- Quiz About My Love Life
- Musings, 3 am
- Remembering Racism
- OJ: You're Finally Juiced
- On Being Single
- Wisdom from a Hooker
- The Seeing-Eye man
- The Other Ground Zero
- Two Weddings and a Funeral
- Ted Kennedy's Brave Fight, and My Husband's
- Dinner with Hill and Bill
- Problems with August
- The Abuser
- My Website
- sololady.com
- S is for Surely Special
- Steve B.
- Sheldon
- Steven A.
- Sandra
- Sally
- Squirrel
- Two Exceptional World Charities
- Heifer International
- Kiva micro-loans
Has America Finally Jumped the Shark?

“Jumping the shark” is a popular phrase around Hollywood. It refers to the old tv series Happy Days, when the previously cool character Arthur Fonzerelli, “The Fonz,” resorts to water-skiing over a shark to prove his bravery. Although the series continued/… Read full post »
Flutterbies, a Canoe Trip Down a Tributary, and Leo

The Amazon River is a swirling, branching force in the Peruvian jungle, midway from where it first sweeps from a trickle in the Andes and swoops toward the Brazilian rain forest. The rusty gingerbread buildings of Iquitos frame piles of rotting bananas, and vultures swirl… Read full post »
Ode to a Sleepy Creep

You let us down again, Phil! You saw your shadow this Tuesday morning!
And after I beseeched you, once again, in the poem below. It's been a cold winter and you give us little hope.
Next year I'm writing about dams and beavers!
Good News Sunday: My Gender-Bender, Victor/Victoria Cruise

This is an updated post about two of the most delightful weeks I've ever spent. Imagine, a straight woman and two thousand gay men cruising ---on a cruise! Now that's good news!
When I stepped onto the gangplank of the Westerdaam th… Read full post »

We’ve gotten used to the iPod and the iPhone; now here comes the iPad. In the coming years I assume we can look forward to a host of other magic gadgets, solving problems with alliterative names:
The iPop Pops corn while you watch movies. Also tells… Read full post »

.
Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the signing of the Indian constitution, celebrated as Republic Day. India is proud and thriving.
I remember twenty five years ago, when the air is clean and the sky is eye-blue on this January national holiday… Read full post »
The Embarrassing Things You'd Find in My Really Big Purse

Art Linkletter used to have a segment on his afternoon tv show back in the day, in which he would surprise a woman in the audience, grab her purse and open it on the air, much to the embarrassment of the lady who would usually be wearing a… Read full post »

There has been jarring rhetoric in the last week: shocking racist comments about the Haiti crisis by Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh; the archaic usages of race and color of Senator Harry Reid. Today, on the eighty-first birthday of Martin Luther King, I’m thinking about my early years… Read full post »
What I Learned from Meeting a Man Who Met Albert Einstein

At a recent holiday dinner my beau and I met Bob, our hostess’s uncle. He had been a renowned yachtsman and had worked at high levels at the admiralty in Washington DC. Bob was now in his 90s, tall and thin, with a shock of white… Read full post »
Misogyny: I Lived With an Abuser

Between my marriages I dated interesting men for 15 years, and had a few meaningful long-term relationships. But for over a year I’m sorry to say that I was in and out of an emotionally and physically abusive relationship.
How could I have been so self-destructive… Read full post »

In 2010 I do NOT resolve to:
1…Stop reading the tabloids at the checkout counter. Forget it. I need to read something besides OS. I’ve already stopped reading newspapers, magazines, books and grocery lists.
2…Drink less. I don’t drink that much. On… Read full post »
OK, What About Your OWN Best Post of 2009?

When writing guidebooks I often have to add lists of "Bests": best hotel view, best bar, best restaurant and so on. Problem is, besides the obvious subjectivity we bring to these kinds of lists, writers can't possible see all the hotel views, sit at all bars (… Read full post »
Azul: Blue Lights in Barcelona
Barcelona from mid-November through early January is ablaze with holiday lights.
On my recent trip I could have concentrated on the golden glow of Antoni Gaudi's astonishing Sagrada Familia cathedral.

a section of the still unfinished cathedral, started in 18… Read full post »

Sermeq Kujalleq, the collapsing glacier in Greenland, from my boat
Later this week – if troubles abate at the climate change talks in Copenhagen -- President Obama will speak with 191 other world leaders about the global warming crisis. But there is posturing and… Read full post »

the Azamara Journey, crossing the Atlantic
I’m writing this watching waves fold to the horizon under a cloud dabbled gray-blue sky in the middle of the Atlantic. I’m on the Azamara Journey, the same small ship I took almost two years ago when I traveled solo to… Read full post »

oasiswine.com
UPDATE: Emails sent between Tareq and Michaele Salahi and Pentagon official Michelle S. Jones show that the couple was never granted approval to attend last week's White House state dinner, according to ABC News. Yet,… Read full post »
My ex married a university president and lived in an historic house where leaves were raked by others and fireplaces crackled picture-perfect below important art and the table was set with Lenox and Steuben. My sons usually spent Thanksgiving at that table.
I adapted to that reality. In the… Read full post »
Why I Stay Here

Stuffjournalistswrite/wordpress.com
With all the bitching and flouncing and analyzing going on around here lately, I’ve thought about why I've stayed on OS for over a year.
This rings true for me. We all have different reasons, and it would be interesting if you… Read full post »

freewebs.com
(Exactly as I remember, on awakening, with my analysis/comments/questions in parentheses.)
I was at a rehearsal of a Broadway show like Bye Bye Birdie or Grease. A retro show, in color. People were… Read full post »

wpclipart.com
October 7, a humid, hot morning in South Florida. I was flying solo to NYC to see my children. The plane was delayed at the gate for about an hour due to windy conditions in New York. But after an extra half an… Read full post »
OK, You Caught Me. I've Fallen in Love

Yesterday, dumb as a brick, I changed the status on my Facebook page from single to “in a relationship.” It was the truth. I would gently edge into my new identity. I thought no one would notice.
Ha. Within minutes I received… Read full post »
About My Bidet! (Photo Essay)
When I bought my Miami condo almost 10 years ago I decided to redo my bathroom and remove the bidet (pronounced bee-DAY).

But the cost of removal was too expensive, as I’d have to change the floor as well. So I decided to keep… Read full post »
Two Weddings & a Funeral, And Why You Should Dance!

(adapted from an earlier post)
I’d rather be forced to watch Glenn Beck nonstop than go to a wedding alone. When the slow-dance music starts I usually head straight for the ladies room, or the door. And as
… Read full post »For My Sister, On a Gratefully Big Birthday
When you were born in Miami we lived in the bougainvillea-covered bungalow on Sheridan Avenue with the kitchen floor like frozen confetti. Grandpa was sick and needed his own room so you slept in the bedroom with mommy and daddy (but half the year daddy was gambling at the dog track… Read full post »

Membersvirtualtourist.com
We’ll get to the famed fellow who gifted me with good jewelry an hour after we met (24-carat gold, thank you very much). But first, a few other reflections of two trips to Rio, that heartbreakingly beautiful and beautifully heartbreaking city,/… Read full post »
Salon.com