As a kid you always know when adults dislike you. No matter how you try to behave in front of them, they’re suspicious. And did you ever notice how when you’re trying really hard to not piss someone off, you unintentionally end up doing the very thing that does piss them off? That’s what happened
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Holidays=Comatose=Our Relatives Did What??
Yesterday I was missing those holidays with my my dad’s family at my great aunts’ farm in Kentucky. There was no TV, no cell phones, no toys, no games. There was no running water and no indoor plumbing. . Water came from a farm pump on the back porch. The outhouse was in the chicken
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Michael Proposes
Let me introduce you to Michael Coleman. Ken and I never missed Chicago guitar bluesman Michael Coleman’s gigs. He’d been blues harmonica legend James Cotton’s band leader and played the kind of funky blues that had people on the dance floor after the first few bars of a song. . Michael lived for his booty
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Are We Really Like That?
Name some of your characteristics. Negative or positive, your choice. Are you smart, good-looking, terrible at relationships, bad at math, a great artist, a supermom, fat, feisty or a hundred other self-images? How did these characteristics get attached to you? Did you decide what you are? I bet you labeled yourself with input from your
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Revenge: It’s a Family Thing
My family on my dad’s side was a close knit, clannish bunch. They have roots going back so far in that one time my grandmother called people who came over on the Mayflower “late comers.” They were a tough bunch, hacking out an existence by hand on their farm. They never did have running water
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Never Too Late to Be Schooled
Wanna be schooled by an entire group of women you’re leading? That’s what happened to me when I innocently asked my Starfish Mothers Sphere the following question, prompted by reading Brene Brown’s Rising Strong. . “Do you think people are doing the best they can?” . I was in the “hell no” camp. People can
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Absolutely Afraid of the Dark
By the time I was born, my parents were ready to get on with their lives. They went out a lot. It made me nervous and paranoid to be left alone in the suddenly big and echo-y house. We didn’t have an alarm system and we lived on a quiet, deserted street. Even with the
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Fabulous! You’re looking absolutely fabulous!
When my daughter Dakota came to visit, we went for our traditional manicure, pedicure and lunch date. We’re not really girly girls but we do like having our toes and fingernails looking groomed and snazzy instead or snagged, bitten, broken and neglected: our usual sad state. . For those of you unaware, manicures and pedicures
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Interrupting the Play
I have a confession to make. I can be a bit of a troublemaker. It’s put me in some dicey and some hilarious situations. When I was in college, I went to a lot of the campus theatrical productions. It was super cheap, usually good entertainment and a place to explore new ideas. Occasionally there
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Playing the Copa
When my friend Michele and I went to Brazil, we didn’t really know what to expect. It was a wonderful experience and we learned and relearned things. Like… what it’s like to be in a country where you don’t speak the language and you go out to eat; how we Americans see race and color
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Aliceville Breakfast
We were in Aliceville, Alabama at a blues festival and we were hungry. . Half my family is from the South and when I get back down there the deep southern comes out in my accent. Suddenly I remember phrases from long ago visits with the grandparents and start dropping endings and drawling my words
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Maybe Zombies are Just Sleep Deprived
For some reason I’m not sleeping. That is, I am sleeping but in only 1-2 hour increments. I’ve tried melatonin, virgin hot toddies, sleep meditations, 1.5Hz binaural beats specifically for sleep. Still every hour or so I’m up, wide awake. I’ve tried relaxing all the parts of my body, one by one, placing a heated
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