from Big Salon

 "It takes a hell of a good man
To be my Mr. Right.
It takes a hell of a sweet man
To see me every night.
It takes a hell of a good man
To be better than no man at all." –Hell of… Read full post »

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 »

I write this as I fly through the night, watching lightning course through thunderheads towering above the dark Caribbean. They seem close, to my right. When the bolts arc through the clouds, for a second or so the sky becomes as blue as at noon. I’ve seen other… Read full post »

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 »

“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 »

As I read the obituaries about Edward Kennedy's death, I feel great empathy. My late husband, Chaim Stern, was diagnosed with glioblastoma in July, 2001-- the same type of aggressive tumor that killed the senator. And so I'm moved to post again a tribute to my brave Chaim.… Read full post »

I've said that dozens of times when I look at a post I have just sent out: I haven’t told anyone else that in my entire life, so why did I spin onto the Internet? And under my real name, and my photo, no less. And now… Read full post »

(Anne Frank by Werner Horvath)

Peter Wilhelm Art Center in Budapest will honor Anne Frank's 80^th birthday with an original artwork exhibition this month 

 (The shooting by an antisemitic 88-year-old man at the Holocaust Museum in Washington is a reminder that antisemitism… Read full post »

Battered singer Rihanna has returned to her boyfriend, the angelic-faced hip-hop singer, Chris Brown. Young, beautiful, talented and rich, they seemed to be living a fairy tale life. Except for her being beaten, punched, choked and bitten by him.

Rihanna wants to stay and work it out.… Read full post »

 solitude, overlooking a herring weir, off a cliff in the Bay of Fundy

I’ve been reading  BuffyW ‘s posts of coping with her beloved husband’s passing and AtHomePilgrim’s series about his brother’s death. And many of us are dealing with lo/… 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 »

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 »

Our concept of time focuses around what’s important to us:  at our mother’s breast … weekends off from school … Christmas to New Year’s recess ... menstrual period to menopause …  summer vacations … semester breaks … base… 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 »

The messy news about Natasha Richardson’s skiing accident has been grotesque and rushed. So was last week’s Enquirer headline, “The End,”  featuring a photo of a gaunt, bald Patrick Swayze. Rush Limbaugh recently assured his millions of  lis… Read full post »

He found me on the Internet. He was a physician, and he liked my smile and he wasn’t afraid of intelligent women and he never had a real love and I had one late in life, and he liked that because it meant that we might, too.… Read full post »

The post I wrote for OS last week, Why I’m Alone,  spun into the blogosphere, and consequences were both good and bad. I learned quite a bit from the experience, which might be helpful for you too. I guess this is a meta post.

You can’t… Read full post »

"I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the/… Read full post »

President Obama says the worst might be over. The market is rising and unemployment has stabilized. But for many of us, it will be a long-haul back to recovery.

I’ve had a roller coaster financial life: well-off (early) and scrappy and single (later) and everything in-between.&nb… Read full post »

Earth Day, April 22, is a time to celebrate gains and accelerate environmental progress. But every day is a time to act to protect our planet.

Writing about travel for more than 30 years, I’ve had the privilege of visiting over 100 countries. I’ve breathed air thick with noxious gases,… Read full post »

 (astoriedlife.com)

I’m so disappointed about the tenor of the healthcare debate, worried about Afghanistan and other hot spots and generally pessimistic about the sanity of many of our congresspeople and their constituents.

So what do I do to further the public discourse? Well,… Read full post »

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 »

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 »

 my front door in Somers, NY --see my reflection in the glass?

Many in this awful economy, and on OS, are suffering more than I, but because of poorly managed fixed-income equities I’ve just had to sell the Westchester County condo that I bought when my husband… Read full post »