So now that health care/insurance reform is signed, I'm trying to determine, like many, many Americans, what it means. There has been invective, insult and intimidation among some who think they know what it means but frankly I am appalled by the nastiness, the rage, the guns (!) nor can...

What I'm Wearing for the Inauguration
(Or from Barbie to Mister Obama)

Like some four million others, we're going to the Inauguration January 20th. We're staying with friends who live sort of near the Mall and, studying a map of Washington D.C., I think we'll be able to walk...

It's Myth America and we need a legend.

The Sarah Palin V.P. choice has ignited a powerful myth -- the daughter of the West, the maverick, the new gun in town. We cannot counter this myth with facts. George Lakoff has made this point very well: Palin's nomination, he...

What was surprising about the inauguration, I guess, is that there was something surprising about a ceremonial, hoary event dating back to 1640 (and whose 3rd office holder was actually Leonard Hoar, I don't know if the words are related.) Around, above and between the symbols, the symposia, the ringing...

Last night a woman told me about a good friend, mother of a fourteen-year-old who goes to an all girls' school, and the untimely death of her friend's husband, the girl's father. The woman said she and her friends rallied around the widow with casseroles and coffee cake and...

Every year at this time, I always got my mother an FTD flower arrangement or, when I had money, a blue blouse (she had blue eyes) for Mother's Day. I'm thinking she didn't mind the endless blue blouses and almost ritual aspect of their gifting or the banal cards with...

February 4th is the first anniversary of Betty Friedan's death. There have been many editorials and obituaries since her departure one year ago. Few mentioned fun, so here is my memory, my tribute to Betty.

I don't think feminists were always fun. Sappho had her 7th century poems and...