June, 3, 2019
Judy Blue Eyes, Somebody to Love, With a Little Help from my Friends — I’ve been singing those and other songs over and over, to memorize the harmonies for a concert our vocal group is giving, honoring the 50th anniversary of Woodstock. I’m the only one in the group who was actually at Woodstock. In 1969, I was a young reporter living in N.Y., covering the city for the Boston Globe. My husband was a disc jockey on the primo FM rock station in the city. They’d been running ads for a three-day […]
Read MoreMarch, 9, 2019
What happens when a new technology is so disruptive that secrets long buried are unearthed, creating havoc and, in some cases, wonder? Back in the 80’s, before we had internet or mobile phones, I created a TV series on ABC called HeartBeat, about a group of women ob-gyns. At that time, there were few women doctors delivering babies, and the show was based on the first all-female group of ob-gyns in Los Angeles. After hanging around their office for months, I wrote an episode about an orthodox Jewish couple having fertility problems. The […]
Read MoreOctober, 24, 2018
DENVER—I was lost, searching for Helen Simon, walking through a maze of corridors in a skilled nursing community—the current term for the dreaded words, “nursing home.” I passed a dining area with no one eating. A grand piano with no one playing. Seeing an attendant, I asked, “Where can I find suite M-2—Helen Simon?” * “She’s not in her room,” the attendant said, pointing to an alcove with a large TV and a woman in a wheelchair parked in front. “That’s her,” she said. I dropped to my knees beside the wheelchair. “Hello, […]
Read MoreSeptember, 24, 2018
This month, I had the privilege of being with my son, Andrew, and his wife, Fay, as she gave birth to their second baby, Emma. I’d been present when their first daughter, Siena, was born, two years earlier. But this was miraculous all over again. At the hospital, Fay had started pushing, and we could see the top of the baby’s head with pitch black hair peeping out. The head inched forward with each push, then receded. The doctor, a young woman with a butch haircut, kept saying, “You’re gonna give birth any moment. […]
Read MoreJuly, 21, 2018
We had little to go on when my sister, Terry, and I took off for Hungary, to reverse the journey our grandparents had made when they’d come to America in the early 1900s. We had some family stories, a couple sepia photos, and an application for U.S. citizenship filled out by our grandfather, Louis Wass. What would we find? It had been more than 100 years since they’d lived there. Two world wars and borders that changed three times had probably destroyed every trace of them. Yet it seems that many are feeling […]
Read MoreApril, 20, 2018
On a sunny afternoon last August, a dozen women from Balfour Senior Living in Louisville, CO, boarded a bus for a field trip to a marijuana dispensary. One used a walker, one was hooked up to an oxygen tank, one wore a linen suit and jewelry, and all were told to wear hats while walking from the bus to the dispensary door. “The sun is our enemy,” one said. Joan Stammerjohn, 84, said she’d joined the group because she’s had chronic pain in her legs and has been taking Oxycontin for ten years. […]
Read MoreJanuary, 8, 2018
The man I married when I was 24 and divorced at 30, a high-powered celebrity whom I’ll call Robert, was fired recently for inappropriate sexual behavior. My first reaction was a pulse of schadenfreude: he was due for this. I’d been waiting for the shoe to drop since the onset of the #Metoo movement. He’d been sexually aggressive since his teens, and when he’d been drinking, he was known to make advances that weren’t always wanted. When a friend told me he’d stuck his tongue in her mouth when hugging her goodby… I’m […]
Read MoreJuly, 11, 2017
Checking my calendar for the week, I see it filled with medical appointments, errands, calling the cable company to fight about the bill, PT for my knees, aerobic exercise for the heart, and mental gymnastics to counter forgetfulness—“Who was, you know, what’s his name’s daughter?” As with many of us, aging is bringing “issues” that make it tough to do things I did with ease just a few years ago. As far back as kindergarten, I’ve been driven to shine, to achieve, win the race, be first in class, selected to give the […]
Read MoreJune, 19, 2017
My singing group, Spirit Voices, recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, with a concert at Nissi’s night club in Colorado. I’m the oldest member of the group, and the only one who, in 1967, spent time in both the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco and New York’s Lower East Side–the twin poles of psychedelia. I was a reporter for the Boston Globe, my first job, and because I was in my early twenties, they sent me out across the country to report on what we called the counter culture. […]
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