Are you, too, a Consenting Adult? Do you welcome frank talk, critical views and a belly laugh now and again? Welcome to my blog. I'm a long-time journalist, activist, ballroom dancer, lover and not so long ago I single-handedly brought down the McCain/Palin ticket through my book Thanks But No Thanks: The Voter's Guide to Sarah Palin.
On Facebook? Friend me at Facebook.com/sue.katz.
Checkpoints are one of the most obtrusive and demeaning methods by which the Israelis control the Palestinians whose land they have been occupying since 1967. The checkpoints cause incredible harm for it is simply impossible to get from any point A to any point B without gruesome and repeated delays and detours, as well as endless humiliation at the hands of young - sometimes teen-aged - Israeli soldiers.
The photo on the left was taken in September, 2008, as people tried to cross from the West Bank town Ramallah to Jerusalem to attend their mosque.
Here's just one example of the harm done, according to the BBC news:
Between 2000 and 2006, at least 68 Palestinian women gave birth at Israeli checkpoints, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Of these 35 women miscarried, and five died in childbirth.
According the United Nations there are more than 600 physical obstructions, including checkpoints, to the movement of Palestinians in the West Bank.
How does it feel? Take seven minutes and watch this short film, No Way Through, please.
Overall, the Cagney & Lacey franchise garnered 36 Emmy nominations and won 14 Emmy Awards in their seven seasons and when the network tried to cancel them, a successful letter-writing campaign kept them on air from 1982-88. In these later films, while we may find their personalities more pronounced and their fitness a bit eroded, they continue to be unapologetically engaging.
This review first appeared on www.EdgeBoston.com
There are times when a family needs a hand. For the Coe family, this is that time. My sister, Carol, has been suffering from liver cancer for two years. Now she’s at the final stage and is about to be moved from the hospital to hospice care. Her son and I are unable to cover all the increasing medical and end-of-life expenses. I’m holding a poetry fundraiser in hopes that my friends and colleagues can help our family deal with this pressing financial burden.
I'm sad to say that my sister Carol passed away on Friday, October 9th, and was laid to rest this past Saturday. Now the focus of tonight's fundraiser is on helping my family deal with her final expenses, and other expenses too numerous to mention here.
But I don't want tonight to be a somber event; I want it to be a celebration of community--an acknowledgment of the tremendous love and support it's been my privilege to receive over these last weeks. So I look forward to seeing you all tonight. And I sincerely thank those who can't attend but have sent contributions.
When I first met Charles through the National Writers Union, he introduced himself to me (and perhaps to some of you) as a “bald-headed Negro from Indianapolis, Indiana.” I soon discovered that Charles is one of the most social guys around. I don’t mean that he’s a party lad – although he is that – but he is a magnet for people whether it’s for a literary or a humanitarian event.
Who knew, during his misspent youth, when he was lead singer for an Indianapolis rock-& roll cover band, … who knew he’d become such a pillar of our community. He moved to New England in the mid-70s and started his career as an “ever-evolving earthling” – always growing, always flowing. He began with song writing and went on to create knock-out poetry and prose. His book Picnic on the Moon was published by Leapfrog Press and his essays, often humorous, have appeared in publications from Harvard Magazine to the Boston Weekly Dig
He serves as co-chair of our National Writers Union/Boston and as the head of the National Writers United Service Organization – national non-profit companion org to NWU. His emphasis is on building community among the writers organizations, so we often work in collaboration with the other groups.
I think of Charles as the guy who steps up. He steps up to organize fundraisers, especially around violence against women - whether it’s for the Casa Myrna Vasquez refuge for women or for the Women’s Network in Lawrence or Jane Doe in Boston. He organized fundraisers after Katrina and after the Tsunami, and he has appeared at a gazillion events that others put together.
He steps up for friends in more or less need. He brought over his drill and ladder and other butch tools when no one else could penetrate my ceiling to hang a light. When he couldn’t either, he bought some special bits to try again.
He threw me the best book party a girl could wish for when my book on Sarah Palin came out.
Probably many people here could talk about how Charles steps up. But we’ve seen him mount the highest steps, through the illness and death in recent years of his father, his mother and now Carol his sister. Luckily, he’s got broad shoulders, our Charles does, and he’s been a rock for his family.
But this succession of family heartbreaks stretched his resources too far. When Charles needed a hand, he totally and completely believed that his community would step up for him. And he was profoundly right. Look around the room and know that for every one of us here, there are at least one or two other people who couldn’t make the date but stepped up to make the gesture.
I think most of us feel lucky to be able to show Charles that we have learned his lesson of generosity and friendship. He’s stepped up so often for us and the things we believe in, and this time we have met his own high standards.
Not only do we get to come together to celebrate the love Charles has demonstrated for Carol and the community he has built, we even get to hear him read. I give you Charles Coe.
There was no way I was going to drive my dodgy car to Provincetown on Labor Day weekend, so Sandy decided we should spend the big bucks for the fast ferry. Eighty big ones, no less. Cool. I like ferries. My car and I have taken one to Long Island. My friend Miri and I took one to Formentera (a desert island off of Spain where we celebrated the Millennium). Ninety minutes and we’ll be in the center of P-Town.
I’ve known Sandy Oppenheimer since she was a twinkle in her parents’ eyes. Her mother and mine grew up together. She is the brilliant collage portrait painter whom my publisher commissioned to do a portrait of Sarah Palin for the cover of my Voter’s Guide, Thanks But No Thanks. If you want a treat, check out her Women’s Series – they’re unique and opulent and, most of all, exquisite. (See the portraits of Frida Kahlo and Romaine Brooks at the left.)
We have to get up at 5:00 to complete the bus/subway/bus/walk trip in time to make the 8:30 ferry. We desperately search for the way to the dock from our final stop at the building known as the World Trade Center in a desolate piece of landfill on the edge of downtown Boston. There are no signs. No one to ask. My constant bitching reminds Sandy of the main character in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book she is reading, Olive Kitteridge. “Olive,” she says to me, “enough already.”
I know myself and I’m fine in a moving vehicle as long as I’m in the front seat. I don’t do so well in back. But by the time we get our ID checked (a peril of printing off our boarding passes at home), the front seats are gone. We sit at a table in the second row. And sit. And sit. Our departure time has long passed and still we sit. No one else seems to be bothered, except for the guy behind us who realizes that he won’t make it to work in time. I ask the concession stand employees what’s up. “The engine won’t start. The Captain’s down in the engine room with some of the other guys trying to figure it out.”
Eventually we depart. I stand outside watching Boston recede with a young lad from County Cork who has only been in the country 48 hours, none of which he has wasted in sleep. When I return to my seat, I start to feel strange. Rapidly, full-blown seasickness overcomes me. I feel that my torso is in a vise and is about to implode. I grip the edge of our table, bend over and stare at its aluminum rim for the rest of the 90 minutes. Sandy observes that yellowish-green – the present color of my face – isn’t all that flattering.
We are delivered by pedicab to the home of our hosts. These are two well-loved long-time artists: Marian Roth the photographer/painter and Mary Deangelis the clothes designer. They were Sandy’s close friends – as were half of P-town’s residents from what I am to see – when she was living in P-town decades ago. Marian and Mary’s house is a wonderland of interesting stuff, multiple interconnecting rooms and a garden dripping with scrumptious ripe tomatoes. It is also a hub of friendship, a veritable community center for women artists of a certain age and their families.
I’m as limp as a dehydrated coleus, but I rouse myself for a couple of hours to join Sandy for our stroll around Provincetown. It is Labor Day weekend, the last gasp of summer. To me the tourists seem rather out-of-place, but it’s not my problem. Our mission is three-fold: to visit Mary’s handsome shop Silk and Feathers and fondle her gorgeous creations; to view Marian’s latest paintings at Kobalt Gallery which displays and sells her work (see The Red Boat, The Backshore and Mary's Day Off to the left); and to find out the location of another friend of Sandy’s, Carol, with only the lead that she is working at one jewelry store or another. While Sandy slips into the plethora of Commercial Street jewelry shops (fruitlessly as it turns out), I lean on whatever solid object – tree, wall, pole – seems likely to hold me upright.
Once we return to our base – and it is a sign of how debilitated I felt that I don’t even recall how we got there - I take to my bed for much of the rest of the day. Luckily, I am reading Tobias Wolff’s captivating memoir This Boy’s Life, so I distract my horizontal self with it while hearing downstairs the serial comings and goings of long-lost friends who have heard that Sandy is in town.
I make it down for dinner – everything of the food persuasion is predicated on the tomato crop – and a chance to meet Barbara E. Cohen, the artist whose painted Polaroids have been collected in a range of sweet books. In a flurry of generosity she presents both Sandy and I with copies of her Provincetown, including unforgettable images of such local icons as the Lobster Pot and drag queens.
Our return to Boston the next afternoon follows a seaside lunch with the elusive Carole Pugliese, a video artist and masseuse, and with the playwright Sinan Unel, a hero who gifts us each with a Dramamine pill, which we swallow without a moment’s hesitation in the hope of avoiding the sea scourge. I’m very nervous about getting a front seat and go all Olive Kitteridge on Sandy, who worries as little as possible about as much as possible. I scurry alone to the end of the pier. In fact, I have to talk the boat employee who is herding the long line of early-arrivers into believing that it will not be worth the crew’s well being to have me go sick on them again. She jumps me up to the front. I call Sandy and her friends who are still back at the lunch café and they bring her up to me at the dock. (I can’t board the ferry without her ID). We get the seats I want.
I fasten the acupressure wrist bands with the bead sitting on some inter-tendon spot and hang on. Nothing happens. In fact, Sandy and I find ourselves dozy and dumb, drooping and numb. We do the reverse trip without incident.
Finally, we get into my apartment and fall onto the upholstery with an uncharacteristic level of dazed stupidity. Sandy maintains enough mental and physical anchor to get herself to my computer where she looks up Dramamine. The side-effects seem like enough to put us into a coma, so we don’t fight it. We make the transformation from visiting the center of a vibrant community whose members look after each other like the high-energy old days of collectives and communes, to being in a drugged-out state of heavy-lidded city dwelling. Home sweet home.
Patrick Swayze, 1991’s "Sexiest Man Alive," has passed away after a couple of years of battling pancreatic cancer. He was best known for his romantic starring roles. According to one article, “’Dirty Dancing’ (1987) and ‘Ghost’ (1990) both made the American Film Institute's 2007 list of the 100 greatest love stories in U.S. movie history.” His hip dancing (he had a classical background) and the relaxed way in which he inhabited his skin knocked us out.
Swayze combined a suave butch-ness with a relaxed self-mockery. He almost failed to get the part of a drag-queen in the cult classic "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar" (1995). "’I couldn't get seen on it because everyone viewed me as terminally heterosexually masculine-macho,’ he told the AP then.”
Let me end with a clip of Swayze’s delicious dance performance with his wife Lisa Nieme at the 1994 World Music Awards.
No healthcare. No abortions. No help to anyone but the bonus class. And now no books?!
The entire Free Library system of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is closing as of October 2. No more books will be lent; no more after-school, ESL or myriad other programs will be held. Budget cuts are leading to the end of books for all those who are dependent on this noble free service. I have probably never used the word “noble” before (at least, not clean of irony), but for me libraries are key to democracy.
I grew up in a Pittsburgh home with few if any books. Once I discovered the free library, weekly visits were integrated into my family’s weekend rituals. We’d get a bit dressed up – not Saturday best, like when I flew on an airplane for the first time on my way to college – but go-out-and-be-seen clothes. My show-off mother, full of airs and graces, would come out on the porch and yell towards the house, loud enough to penetrate all the attached row houses next to and across from us, “Let’s get Susie to the library,” and out would come my dad and maybe my brother. The three of them would go have a kosher hotdog at the famous Original Hotdogs, around the corner from the library, while I piled up Marjorie Morningstar and Exodus.
Many years later, while living in an Absorption Center in a then-small town (now bloated) in Israel, I spoke to the librarian about their lack of books in English. “Would you be willing to stock it?” she asked. She gave me carte blanche at the two Tel Aviv used bookstores with English books and I began to visit weekly. All I had to do was select and pile my choices. The store boxed and shipped them to the library.
I started with my beloved 19th Century literature – Dickens, Thackeray, Austen, Gaskell, Alcott, Twain, Bronte, Elliot – okay, I’ll stop. Then I began filling in around that – non-fiction, academic, literature from other centuries. I loved feeling so personally invested in a local library.
In Britain, throughout the 1990s, my genteel crumbling local library was in walking distance and I loved the way they organized sections for activists – a women’s aisle, a queer section, another of literature by authors of color, and the way they stocked all the radical publications.
Right now I have an amazing library just five minutes away with a reading room that gives off that handsome, musty feeling of the old British Library’s reading room.
Without libraries, there is little chance for class mobility. With all its bullshit about America being a meritocracy, that all you need is to work hard (at least in the days when there were jobs), that the cream rises to the top, that you just need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, in fact we sit with France, Italy and the UK at the bottom of the class mobility list. (Denmark, Norway, Finland and Canada are at the top.)
Of course the Internet, you are saying, is the great leveler. That’s assuming that every kid has a computer. Those who don’t? They can use them at the library. In fact, they can learn to use a computer at the library. Librarians can help folks who don’t know where to start or how to continue. Let’s not forget that librarians were the one professional group who absolutely refused to go along with the Patriot Act demands to reveal info about their patrons.
The Philadelphia libraries that are closing do a lot more than lend books. They take books to groups in the community who can’t drop by the library very easily, like to senior centers and homebound individuals; there are programs for children and for job-seekers; they have the world's largest lending library of orchestral performance material; they have books in Braille, large print and recorded books.
A lot of people will be bitterly disappointed if Philadelphia goes through with this unthinkable deprivation. Even more people will find their lives becoming limited. Free libraries even out the playing field a bit, and with so many people affected by the greed of the bonus class, even a little bit is something.
I’ve been to a lot of libraries in a lot of places in the world, but I’ve never been to a Philly library. I hope that I’ll have that chance. The CEOs have received obscene rewards for taking us all down. They’re clearly feeling all stimulated, but for me, this blow is simply too, too much. Don’t lock up our books. Free the books!
Are you on Facebook? I am. I resisted for eons, but now I have to admit that it has become a key source of info and connection and has, at least temporarily, replaced some aspects of my beloved blog. Does that make me a cheater? A slut? Before I explain why I sneak behind my blog’s back to play on Facebook, let me delve, for the first time, into my blogging process.
Writing, not Updating
I have never been a mood blogger – never used it to update people on my whereabouts, my stomach ache or my pets (perhaps because I have none). “Consenting Adult” has always been a platform for my writing, including cultural reviews (the Olympics), obituaries (Studs Terkel) and, of course, Sarah Palin (this one is a class analysis of her fancy clothes). I’ve written about The Daily Show’s flat-footed ridicule of older peoples’ sexiness in “The Daily Show Gets it Totally Wrong – Again,” about tootsie torture in “Running - Or Crawling - in High Heels,” and then there are my periodic rants against marriage (queer or hetero), like “Marriage-Schmarriage Revisited.”
What Does a Blog Posting Entail?
Each posting on my blog involves a serious chunk of non-paid time. First I need to do the research for the piece. Then I compose it, review it and revise it several times. If I’m lucky (and my readers are too), my personal editor also gets a chance to go over it. I search for freely shared images to accompany the piece (and get surprising little feedback from readers on that effort, despite working hard to make the illustrations funny or weird or pointed). Then I save it into a “notepad” (non-formatted) file before pasting it into my blog template.
Now begins the online formatting process of putting it into a font type and size that is easily read by eyes of all ages. I insert hyperlinks so people can effortlessly click to get to my original sources or further information, and then I insert the saved images. This can take several tries, because I need to experiment with the size and spacing of the photos. Book titles or foreign words that should be in italics are done by hand, one by one. I put subtitles in bold and indent longer quotations.
When everything’s looking tidy, I upload the posting and then I check it on the website itself. I go to another website that “announces” to the Internet that I have posted something and then I wait for Susan, my friend the Copy-Edit Police, to email me with errors or misspellings. Then I have to go back in and re-do and update.
If the piece resonates, readers will write with comments which I need to pre-approve by an awkward process that involves moving among several sites. If I want to reply online, I have to retrace that process again.
Facebook
Being active on Facebook is infinitely easier. It’s not a writing platform for me, so much as an amplification of my voice. It is one-click simplicity to enter a link or a video clip or a photo, and as simple as typing to add my editorial comment. A couple of times a day, I go all Facebook, reading and sometimes reproducing the entries of my Facebook “friends” (I hate Facebook’s cannibalization of the word “friend”), some of whom I only know virtually. Then I put up my own postings, often taken from the international press and referencing the issues that are important to me: sexualities, gender, the Middle East, boomers, ageing and my frustrations with the new administration. If I want to lighten up for a minute, I put up some music I love via YouTube or an animation or cartoon.
It’s all so quick and easy to post on Facebook. But it isn’t writing.
I’m Back
Thanks to those of you who have written to ask where I disappeared to and why I haven’t been blogging very regularly. I’m coming back to my blog. Because I have a lot I want to say. Because I am a writer. And because sometimes just a link and a tune aren’t enough.
A Connecticut woman has been busted for having sex in a library restroom and her kids, who were safely in the library, have been taken into custody by the authorities. The woman is homeless – that is, she has no cozy private corner of her own and probably no money to 'get a room.' She stays at a shelter. The guy she was with “escaped before police arrived,” but police apparently have identified him.
The charges are severe, big-time: “risk of injury to a minor, public indecency and disorderly conduct.”
And surprise of surprise, “It was not immediately clear if she has a lawyer.” I find this story so terribly depressing, especially set against news of billions of bonuses for economic criminals who brought down the world’s economy and news of war criminals enjoying lots of tv face-time and lucrative speaking gigs.
I find this story horrifying, not because of the lovers’ indiscretion (they were “caught” by a shocked woman and her 4-year-old coming into the restroom), but because of their lack of options. I don’t support public sex when the public haven’t consented, so I am certainly not advocating nooky in unlocked public spaces where other people can be surprised against their will. But I doubt that this couple was just out for some reckless kink.
And now I’m just going to make it up. Since we haven’t been given many details, I’m totally projecting here, but I suspect that this woman just might have preferred a king-size bed, Egyptian cotton sheets, fresh-squeezed lemonade next to the bed, some sweet music on the Bose and all the time in the world. She would have preferred leaving her kids with a baby-sitter, instead of looking at picture-books sitting in the library’s children’s room.
And don’t get me started on the tone of moral outrage in the reports – when we know that a surprising number of our deceitful, philandering (always wanted to use that word) male lawmakers and religious leaders are the last people who should be throwing stones.
Instead of being arrested, this woman should be given a decent job, some clean digs and a chance at love.
I’ve been to Latvia and Peru and Turkey and Iceland and Kenya and a dozen or so other places, but there is a lot of the United States I have never seen, even here in New England. My old/new friend Judy offered me the use of her New Hampshire chalet for a summer holiday. B (who did most of these photos) clears his schedule, and we are off for a four-day weekend of chilling out. To make the most of our abbreviated vacation, we leave after work on Wednesday evening, at nearly 8:00pm. There’s a reason that I mention the late hour.
It is foggy and rainy and dark and about half-way there an insect gets into the car who makes not one but several meals of my flesh, leaving me with silver-dollar-sized welts on my arm, behind my ear and where my thigh meets my hip. This is just a hint of what NH’s Mosquito Nation has in mind for me.
Once we drive through Conway and North Conway, home of the outlet malls, we try to follow Judy’s directions, but in the wet dark we cannot discern a street from a driveway. We are lost. At 11:20 we despair of finding it and I pull out my cellphone to wake poor Judy up. She guides us to the door of the house by telephone with groggy good will.
The house combines almost total tree-encased privacy with the convenience of being two blocks from the main road. Only the muted sound of traffic reminds us that other people exist. The downstairs has a couple of good-sized bedrooms and the one giant room upstairs includes the kitchen, a substantial island, a mini-office, a living room with a working fireplace and a puzzle corner with a 1000 piece puzzle in the making on a designated table. I happily inhale the scent of sweet burned wood. Everything spells comfort – from wifi to cable tv to the turntable and records to the cutest toaster ever.
Thursday We have breakfast at “Yesterday’s” in nearby Jackson Center. A glance in the windows of a real estate office reveal some affordable real estate for anyone with a steady job, a lack of voracious creditors and an incomprehensible desire to get into the present real estate market.
We drive into North Conway and spend a retro hour in a legendary local store: an old-fashioned head/sex-toy shop called Headlines. The area is famous for outlet malls, so we drive over to join the (modest) crowds at one of those, but we fail to find the charm or the bargains. Luckily, on the way home we stop by an agreeable dollar store and pick up some of my favorite scrubby-sponges and $1 sensitive toothpaste. My retail jones is quieted for the day.
The first thing I notice as we toot about is that almost everyone in the area – both locals and visitors – is white. It reminds me of the Home Counties in England where, once you are south of the boundaries of the ethnic mix of London, you encounter an almost scary degree of homogeneity. I always felt like I was wearing a big iridescent tattoo on my forehead: JEW! I can only imagine how exposed people of color feel in such surroundings. But, as B reminds me, this is New England of the USA.
A big hunk of visitors are the ubiquitous bikers – most of them of a certain age. I recently read that the Harley-Davidson company is worried about who will buy their goods when the boomers stop riding. From what we see all weekend, that’s not happening soon. I notice two (assumedly unrelated) things about the bikers: at least half the women now ride their own wheels and a high proportion of the riders are fat. Restaurants, bars and motels in the area all display their “Bikers Welcome” shingle.
Friday
It pours from morning to night so we stay in. I spend a couple of hours of “practical” time, watching a mediocre exercise video put out by So You Think You Can Dance, which I am reviewing for an arts and entertainment portal. And I’m reading short stories by Tobias Wolff, whose first novel Old School recently blew me away.
The house is embraced from every direction by evergreens and birch trees. Standing on, the expansive deck, watching the rain, I figure the view must be pretty fabulous in winter, too.
I cook dinner for us and notice that the classy pots and pans are newish. Judy will tell me later that their only break-in resulted in the theft of all their pots and pans, plus the paper towel dispenser. This is so puzzling that I wonder if there isn’t a short story hidden in there somewhere.
Saturday Sunny Saturday is our only remaining opportunity to be tourists. Annoyingly, after all the rain, just walking from the door to the car nets me about a dozen swelling, itching mosquito bites. I’m a living magnet, always have been. To a freaky degree, despite dousing myself with bug spray. Although I lavish myself with the stinky poison, as the day passes, the bugs prove to be utterly undeterred.
We are adopting everyone’s suggestion and driving the 34.5 miles of the Kancamagus Scenic Byway, through the White Mountains National Park. We know there are plenty of picnic possibilities along The Kanc, as insiders call it, so we stop at a convenience shop called Lil Store on the Kanc (see photo above) for what turns out to be fresh, fab sandwiches, sweet cole slaw and rich potato salad. It is run by a couple of boomers who have had to change gears. His construction work dried up right before the store became available. They invested sweat equity and stock it with whatever passers-by need – from sunglasses (a biker wanted some after his had been blown off) to instant cameras to ice cream and to her home-made food.
We enter The Kanc at Conway on the eastern end, heading towards Lincoln to the west. Along the way, we are impressed with how well this national park is organized. A $3 day-pass for the car allows us to pull off at any of the organized sites, from the swift river to mountain trails to scenic overviews. We stop at a number of very sweet spots along the way, including a private nook along the river with big flat rocks on which to rest our asses as we eat our lunch (see photo left). We climb along the famous Sabbaday Waterfalls (see photo below) and catch the views from both sides of the mountains. I grew up in mountains and nearby forests, so I find this landscape comforting.
I am amazed at how little traffic there is on the Kanc, although a number of the road-side parking lots for official trails and recreation centers are filled with SUVs and swarming with nuclear families.
It is only on our return that I look for the source of the name. According to Wikipedia, “The highway is named after Kancamagus ("The Fearless One"), who ruled as the third and final Sagamon of the Panacook Confederacy (sometimes spelled Penacook) of Native American tribes in what is now southern New Hampshire.[1] In 1691, due to fighting with English settlers, he made the decision to move north into upper New Hampshire and what is now Quebec, Canada.”
When we’re done going up and coming back down and arrive at the far point, Lincoln, we have to decide whether to retrace our return or go by an alternative route that looks longer. We decide to return via The Kanc so that we can make additional stops, but just as we’re making a circle in Lincoln to turn us around, I spy a thrift shop in a parade of stores.
It is massive, it is air-conditioned and it is Christian. Not only can we pick up items for modest sums, we can take a free bible. What could be more enticing? In fact, a certain fuzzy off-white jacket (new, I believe) that is 100% cotton and of a texture somewhere between terry cloth and chenille is going for $9. That’s four dollars more than I usually budget for any such purchase, but, hell, I’m on vacation. I toss my money down on the counter as if I were a person who knew where to get more. I turn down the bible.
Sunday
It’s over. We must clean away all evidence of having been here, switch off the water and head home. When we stop for gas, I ask some locals where to eat and they send us off to a Mall eatery that turns out to do some mean French-fried sweet potatoes. Our stomachs have plenty of time to settle, though, because we spend most of the evening stuck in immobile traffic. Nothing says “Kiss your sweet break bye-bye” like a traffic stand-still on a mall-lined artery.
Three hundred women crowded into Somerset, England, to vie for a job. Most of them had wild hair, pointy big hats and a cackled laugh meant to bring on shivers. A tourist attraction was hiring a witch - at the unusually generous salary of 50,000 British Pounds. Unfortunately for the witches, that was actually going to be pro rata for holidays and events only.
According to one news source, "The job to teach visitors about witchcraft and magic attracted 2,319 applicants, including a London banker, after it was advertised in local newspapers and job centres earlier this month."
Carole Bohanan (see photo), 40, a small town real estate agent, won the position under her witch name Carla Calamity . She said that this wasn't much of a diversion from her day job, since she had to use a bit of witchery magic to move any property in the present market.
The BBC interviewer warned her that she'd have to live in a damp dark cold cave and she responded with a kind of desperate gaiety that, "You know I'm renting at the moment and I have puddles coming up through the flagstones, so I'm pretty used to living in a damp residence. This is probably going to be like living in a palace in comparison."
When a cave is a step up for a working woman, you know that times are rough.
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