Retro-A-Rama

We need a change STAT! The Democrats are on life support, and all they can offer up is a guy with a Nazi tattoo and a string of sexual abuse accusations. C’mon, Man! We need a reboot. We need a woman! The hypocrisy continues to burn our country down. Platner has got to go ASAP.

“Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty,” a protective president warned a nervous nation during a July 4th  speech. The Communists are coming, people. They are living among us. This is no time to duck and cover. Get out from under your desks and fight this evil force. But that president was not Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. It was Donald J. Trump, in 2026, echoing the anti communist…

Last week with our 250th birthday in mind, I walked through my town of Huntington, Long Island. Settled in 1653, over a century before the Declaration of Independence, it is steeped in American history. Climbing the hill to the old Town Hall with its monumental porticoed front and prominent clock tower, I stood among the rows of flapping American flags, letting them wrap around me in the…

On a bookshelf in my cluttered office is a small, hardcover book I was given in third grade. The well-worn book nestled in between My Dick Jane and Sally primers is titled  I Am an American. This book was brand new when I was assigned it on the first day of school in 1963. The pages were still crisp with firm, uncreased edges, and the spine was still stiff, opening it for the first time. The book…

Everything about Trump’s tacky, self-indulgent atrocity billed as a Birthday Celebration was vulgar. The travesty was worse than we imagined. A violent, Vegas-style carousel of greased-up men duking it out Gladiator style on the White House lawn, desecrating sacred ground as the rich and powerful cheered on. An abomination that ended with a vile and racist comment. All while the average American…

  A few weeks ago was my mother Betty’s yartzeit. 18 years. My mother has now been gone the length of my entire childhood. Those first 18 years seemed like an eternity as I was growing up. A lifetime, in fact. Yet now 18 years seems to have passed in a flash. It could be 8 years, or sometimes it feels like 18 months. Grief time doesn’t follow physics. Eighteen years ago this summer, a few months…

Kennedy Campaign Worker in tears 1968 Robert F. Kennedy represented hope. But on June 6, 1968, a nation was left once more to watch and grieve and wonder after another senseless act of violence robbed us of that hope. The GE alarm clock in my bedroom set to get me up in time to catch the school bus didn’t go off, as usual, that morning of June 5th, 1968. Instead, my mother came into my bedroom…

I was four years old in 1959, when I first dressed up as Marilyn Monroe, and it would follow me to my freshman year at Syracuse University, where I regularly roamed the halls of my dorm, decked out as the blonde bombshell. Not for a party. Not for an event. For no other reason than it was what I always enjoyed doing. I was just me being me. Being Marilyn. From the moment I saw an incandescent…

  On the same sunny Sunday that thousands of my fellow citizens gathered on the National Mall for a day-long event to “rededicate” America to Christianity, thus leaving millions of non-Christians like me out in the cold, I was told by a reader of this blog that because I am Jewish, I am not white. Color me dismissed. One nation under God. A white God. A Christian God. Jesus Christ, help us. It…

They didn’t give their lives to live in a dictatorship. They didn’t give their lives to a country that would turn against its people, deprive them of resources, finances, and health care. They didn’t give their lives to a country that would attack civil liberties, allow masked thugs to roam our streets, and whisk children away to live in internment camps. For 250 years, these soldiers and sailors…

Late last night,  Donald Trump, our very unpresidential president, posted an AI-generated video showing him tossing Steven Colbert into a dumpster in yet another childish outburst mocking his enemies. The video, posted to Truth Social, shows Colbert onstage for the taping of the last episode of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” before Trump walks up behind him, grabs him by his shoulders, and…

First they came for the comedians… Steven Colbert’s long goodbye came to an end last night We lost one of the nation’s funniest and most courageous, truthful critics of Donald Trump and his lawless, authoritarian regime. Shame on you, CBS. You will forever sport a black eye. Our democracy will be the worse for it. First they came for the comedians… Colbert made us think. He made us laugh. Two…

Looking like a skeleton is no longer just for Halloween; it’s the latest Hollywood trend on the fast track to becoming a beauty standard. As award seasons and fashion week converged, shockingly skeletal women were walking the red carpet and sashaying down runways. You could spot Ozempified actresses on the red carpet sporting collarbones and sternum like another accessory from Van Cleef and…

  Make America Great Again or Make America White Again? That is the question I ask in my short, but timely video “American Diversity Whitewash” that takes apart the fake image of diversity sold to Americans for decades and how it has helped create the white-washed world of Donald Trump. The video is based on my collage “American Diversity Whitewash,” which will be on view at The Hecksher Museum…

Make America Great Again or Make America White Again? That is the question I ask in my short, but timely video “American Diversity Whitewash” that takes apart the fake image of diversity sold to Americans for decades and how it has helped create the white-washed world of Donald Trump. The video is based on my collage “American Diversity Whitewash,” which will be on view at The Hecksher Museum in…

Yesterday, my thoughts were all about my mother. Today I’m thinking of my father Marvin, on his 9th yahrzeit. As so many of us who are children of the greatest generation, there is an uncomfortable relief I feel that he is not here to see the country he loved and fought for destroyed. The post-war world of tomorrow that fueled my father’s dreams and was passed on to me is gone. I cry for the…

Mother’s Day is a complicated day for so many of us. For those like me who no longer have a living mother yet live with their spirit and love every day it can be a difficult day of longing, deeply missing their presence. Equally difficult are those whose mothers were sadly never cut out to be mothers and could never give their children what they needed, making it a different day of longing, and a…