“All you can do is open up the throttle all the way and keep your nose up in the air.” First Lieutenant Meyer C. Newell P-51 Mustang Fighter Jock Separated from his squadron, shot up and leaking hydraulic fluid somewhere in the skies over Burma What is the measure of success? What is the measure…
Picking up the thread… College a no-go. Work a disaster. Israel a bust. Spending a lonely night sitting in the terminal at Lod Airport (now David Ben Gurion Airport) waiting for my 5 A.M. flight to New York. Trying to ignore leering men. Struggling to stay awake. Not knowing where to go or what to…
We pick up the story a few months after my parents pulled me out of Quinnipiac and sent me off to work to “learn the value of a dollar.” I joined the drones commuting to lackluster jobs on Wall Street. Got a job as a receptionist. Had my first experience with sexual harassment from the…
I wasn’t sure what to write about this week. Then I read Martha’s column about Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and I watched the video. Then I read Denny’s column about what it takes to get hired. So I thought I might put my two cents in by…
Ah, the joys of writing. Well, not when you’re working on your capstone project, the culmination of the past 18 months, the paper that will lead me to that walk down the aisle in mortarboard and gown to the hallowed, somber notes of Pomp and Circumstance. How did that get to be the graduation processional…
You know what they say. Moms. Can’t live without em… Um. Right. In honor of all the wonderful women without whom we wouldn’t be here, today’s column is about moms. Specifically, a mom with a kid who happen to have X-ray vision, the power of flight, is invulnerable – you know. This über-mom, is, of…
Yesterday I stopped by Vector Comics, my local dispenser of all things comics related, to pick up my readings, which included Vertigo’s Saucer Country by Paul Cornell and Ryan Kelly, ComicMix columnist John Ostrander’s Dawn Of The Jedi: Force Storm from Dark Horse, and the latest issue of Dark Horse’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer by…
This one’s for Martha … Nothing like a good book to get the rabble-rousers going. In Field Of Dreams, Ray Kinsella’s wife, played by Amy Madigan, successfully shuts down the effort to ban Terence Mann’s books from the local Iowa school system. Terence Mann – played by James Earl Jones – was based on J.D….
There’s a great interview with Joss Whedon, director of the upcoming The Avengers movie, out May 4th, in Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times. Anyone who reads these columns with any regularity already knows that I am a Buffy geek. But you don’t know that I originally ignored it. Yep, that’s…
I think Catwoman is the most fascinating woman in the DC universe. I can never have a conversation about the character with men and women of a certain age about her without their mentioning Julie Newmar, who played the lithe kittenish female fatale on the Batman television series of the ‘60s as a woman whom…
Before I begin this week’s column, I need to correct an error from last week’s Music to Write By. Daughter Alixandra let me know that it’s Ewan Mcgregror who stars in Moulin Rouge, not Ethan Hawke. Onward. Unless you were vacationing in another dimension last week, you know that the Supreme Court heard arguments on…
Every writer has his or her way of settling down to write. Mine is to bring a Diet Pepsi and a pack of Salem cigarettes – yeah, yeah, I know… my bad – to my computer desk. Oh, yeah, and slipping in a CD. Here’s the dope. I’m pretty much out of the loop when…
