Stew and I watch the Oscars, a day or two after they actually take place, with the invaluable aid of a recording machine that allows us to zoom past commercials, logorrheic acceptance speeches, clips of movies we've already seen and other time-wasters, and effectively condense the three-hour marathon of self-indulgence into a more bearable package, one …
Continue reading A giant step for Mexico's little brown people? Hold that applause.
Enchanting as San Miguel is to us—the intimacy, climate, our beautiful ranch and the dear friends we have here—it still does the mind and soul good to escape periodically to the larger playpen of a bigger city, a really big city.What is it about a big city that thrills, despite the obvious drawbacks of crowds …
My trip to Cuba with my husband Stew in 2013 in large part was a pilgrimage to try to reconstruct my childhood, abruptly interrupted in 1962 when, at age fourteen, I had been shipped off to Miami with thousands of other children, presumably to save us from the communist apocalypse about to engulf the island.What …
Continue reading Trump revives memories of my "shithole" country
The very thing that Stew and I love about big cities, and New York in particular, is their heady diversity. Entering such places feels as exciting, and revealing, as diving into a sea teeming with all sorts of creatures you've not quite familiar with. Yet it's precisely that diversity, all those differences, that so many …
Continue reading The melting pot is alive and well in New York City
While it worked, for more than thirty years in fact, the Republican political strategy of divisiveness—the use of "wedge issues," to pit social, racial, religious and political groups against each other in order to gain political advantage—worked quite well.Southern white voters abandoned the Democrats in favor of the Republicans, even if they brought brought with …
Being neither a Southerner nor a rider, I'm not about to get on any preachy high horse about the Paula Deen debacle. I admit to being mystified, though, how an extremely savvy and wealthy businesswoman, no matter how distraught she might feel or what part of the country she comes from, could drop a grammatical …
El Rancho Santa Clara 