I was a young stay-at-home mom with a 9 month-old baby boy when we moved to the city in the late 1970s – a perfect confluence of time, place and circumstance! In those early years Noah and I spent lots of time in the Carl Schurz Park playground, the Central Park zoo and the library, and making the rounds of birthday parties and play dates and a myriad of children’s activities at the museums and elsewhere around the city. And as every parent knows, seeing the world...
It is with a broken heart I write that my sister Laurie died in Rockville on July 22 at age 61 after a long battle with MS. Laurie spent the last years of her life at Potomac Valley Nursing Center, and for their compassionate care, that of the wonderful JSSA hospice team, and many others in Maryland who gave our family comfort and support, I will be ever grateful. Mr Rogers told us in times of tragedy to look for the helpers, and we found them. But although Laurie’s death was...
Some of you who read my recent blog post about my great-aunt Miriam and my uncle Sol, the two gifted thespians in our family, were surprised to learn that I had dramatic aspirations myself . (THE ROAR OF THE GREASEPAINT, June 15, 2015) But although that’s me vamping it up as Helen Morgan, and although I did have a real aptitude for acting, I took a more conventional career path, girl-child of the 50s that I was, and became a high school librarian. But I’ll always...
I love looking at art and there are many artists I admire – Caravaggio, Lautrec, Alice Neel and Lucien Freud, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Renoir and Degas, John Singer Sargent, Chagall, Andrew Wyeth, Thomas Eakins, Andy Warhol, Franz Marc, Goya and Velasquez, Edward Hopper, Modigliani, Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, Cezanne, Raphael Soyer and Ben Shahn, Will Barnett and Jacob Lawrence, Picasso, Magritte, Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, Van Gogh...
I had a long and happy career as a school librarian, but to tell you the truth since I was a girl I dreamt of a life on the stage! Acting runs in my family. My beautiful and glamorous great-aunt Miriam Elias studied at the Moscow Art Theatre with the great Stanislavski, and according to family legend, had a dalliance with the great Russian artist and theatre designer Marc Chagall. In Moscow she married another designer, Boris Aronson. The marriage didn’t last, but years...