In his Sunday New York Times’ piece “The Unexamined Male Libido,” writer Stephen Marche offers this revelatory thought: “Men arrive at this moment of reckoning (about sexual harassment) woefully unprepared. Most are shocked by the reality of women’s lived experience.”
Translation: Men live with women. Men sleep with women. Men father women’s children. But they don’t know them. ...
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Somewhere up there, Princess Diana is smiling.
And Wallis Warfield Simpson, aka the Duchess of Windsor, is laughing her skinny butt off.
For Prince Harry of Wales has announced that come next spring he is taking a bride. And not just any bride but a divorced, American one at that. ...
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I once had a movie producer kiss me on the neck.
How’s that for an opening sentence? Pretty good, huh? Got your attention, right?
It was at the end of an interview when, shaking my hand goodbye, he suddenly lurched forward and kissed me on the neck. (It may have been more of a bite than a kiss, but I don’t actually remember and don’t want to overstate what was a pretty bizarre sendoff.)
Afterward, the embarrassed publicist apologized, concerned that I would be writing about this. But I was a young journalist and had, as a woman, been raised to soldier on. So I said, wrote and did nothing about this. And I hadn’t thought about it until Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual harassment of, well, just about every woman on the planet opened the floodgates of ew-ness. ...
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A shout-out to Frank Bruni of The New York Times for a truly terrific column about President Donald J. Trump and Vladimir Putin and the bromance of the century (although French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may yet give them a run for their money).
Brilliant though the column is in comparing Pump (Putin-Trump) to the great love stories (“Romeo and Juliet,” “Casablanca”), Bruni missed one, “Brokeback Mountain.” When the haunting movie of Annie Proulx’s sparely beautiful story came out in 2005, much was made of the gay love story. ...
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Stock markets are up as the world breathes a sigh of relief at the thought that Emmanuel Macron may be the next president of France.
On May 7, he and his En Marche! Party face off against Marine Le Pen and her National Front Party, having been the two top vote-getters in the first round. Basically, he’s the President Barack Obama of this story ...
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Just when we needed a well-deserved break from the circus that is the Trump Administration – what with former National Security adviser Michael Flynn seeking immunity to testify about Ruskie hacking and oxymoronic House Intelligence chair Devin Nunes skulking around the White House bushes like the star of some third rate Tom Clancy thriller and President Trumpet and Ayn Rand-reading House Speaker Paulie PowerPoint trying to keep the No, No Nanettes of the Freedom Caucus in line for another pass (God help us) at repeal and replace – Brexit is back to remind us that it is just a transatlantic mirror of all of the above. ...
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Though I admired Debbie Reynolds’ and Carrie Fisher’s talents, I can’t say that I followed their careers particularly. And yet, the deaths of this mother and daughter – one day apart, the daughter’s, Fisher’s, first on Dec. 27, perhaps causing the mother’s from a broken heart– resonate with me. As the daughter of a glamorous mother who often upstaged me, I got the “Postcards From the Edge” aspect of the Debbie-Carrie relationship. But as the niece of a beloved aunt who raised me and whom I mourn so intently that I just dreamt about her the other night, I also understand the Debbie-Carrie who lived next door to each other.
The mother-daughter bond is perhaps not as fraught as the power struggle between fathers and sons but it is no doubt more intense. At its heart is the quest for control and perfection that is part of each woman’s hypercritical life. But there’s also an intimacy and, yes, a real love as mothers and daughters become neighbors, roommates and friends. ...
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