Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

Remembering Doreen Gordon who has died at 93

My friend Doreen Gordon is dead at 93. I met her when she signed up for my senior fitness classes at the Brookline Senior Center and she rapidly became the keystone to our community. Not only did she find ways to connect otherwise isolated seniors with each other, she inspired the personality of Lillian, the protagonist in my short story in the collection Lillian’s Last Affair. Well, in one sense. The old-woman-talking-like-a-sailor sense. More about that below. (From left: Doreen, Yolanda, me)

Doreen came from quite a posh South African background, lived a cultured life in New York with her late husband and two incredible daughters Jenny and Amy, and then moved to Boston to be close to one daughter and granddaughter after she recovered from being hit by a damned bus. Doreen was such a petite and put-together woman that between herself and the bus, it was not a fair fight.

To build connection among my students, Doreen began hosting high teas in her fabulous apartment, taking us group by group. Her closest friend from the class, Yolanda, often attended all the groups. We’d have finger sandwiches with salmon and the most luxurious selection of pastries known to human taste buds. I was often tempted to steal the leftovers – friendship be damned – but in fact she often made me up a care package with my favorites: the mini-scones and the crispy almond cookies. (Tea Party: Doreen third from right, laughing)

She used her baking skills to bring joy to every occasion we could find to celebrate, refusing to take money for the ingredients. She picked out the movies for us to see on senior discount matinee day. She told me privately when I was being too hard on someone in the class, or too soft. Doreen and I had what amounted to a secret consultation phone relationship behind the scene of our group. We talked about everyone and everything. She hooked me up with her daughter Jenny when I went to New Orleans for the first time, and Jenny pointed me to all the right places. Doreen invited me a few times to join her to watch the Boston Marathon on the sidewalk in front of her daughter Amy’s house, which is on the route. Amy would have oranges to peel so that we could hold sections in the flat of our hands for the runners to grab. It was on the way home from one such afternoon that my train was stopped at Kenmore Square and we all had to get off and run upstairs. The Marathon bombs had just gone off at the next stop. (Marathon day: Doreen and Amy in center)

But I digress. How did she inspire the character of Lillian? One day in the run-up to the 2008 election, we went to Trader Joe’s together (something we did a number of times). As we crossed the main intersection of Brookline at Beacon and Harvard, there was a man holding a huge sign, a large poster of Barak Obama with a Hitler mustache. Doreen walked right up to him, looked up to his face a good foot or so above her, and hissed, “Fuck You!”

I’m sure this man had already put up with plenty of abuse in that spot in the middle of a Jewish neighborhood, but he never anticipated such a curse from this tiny lovely white-haired woman. Later she told me that she had spent her whole life being prim and proper, but at this point she no longer felt the need to restrain herself. And with that sentence, the character of Lillian was born in my imagination, a woman who perfected swearing late in life.

Life is full of losses as we age, and this is a biggie. I’m only sorry that Doreen, with her love of humans and music and art and travel and good food, had to spend her final period under the regime of tRump. Many in the community which she built among my students pre-deceased her, but next Saturday I will be able to connect with dear Yolanda, with Doreen’s precious family, and with those of us who are lucky to still be around to mourn her.

Gina Ogden: August 9, 1935 – November 2, 2018

My friend Gina Ogden has died at age 83 of stage IV lung cancer at home surrounded by her long-time lover Jo Chaffee, her daughter Cathy and son Philip, and her close friend and nurse Tina, who came from Sweden to care for her.

After her diagnosis in January, Gina consulted a variety of medical and healing folks and decided to forgo traditional Western treatment, so that she would live out the time she had left as joyfully as always. She used complimentary medicine to build herself up for this last period and palliative care to get her through it. We went swimming this summer at Walden Pond. We met for our traditional bi-weekly teas at the Porter Square Independent Bookstore. She gifted me her most sparkling shirt so I’d have a new outfit to wear to the holiday party we always went to together.

Gina and I were writing buddies: she did close readings of my manuscripts and I did the same for her. We met through a mutual friend, a very successful writer, the late Sarah Wernick. We were all in a writers’ union together, although I did not then know Gina. Sarah and I had an additional connection: she was a student in my senior fitness group. Sarah offered to help me with my proposal for a non-fiction book in exchange for my working privately with her husband, who had Parkinson’s Disease. Even after he no longer wanted to train, Sarah continued to mentor my proposal, right through her diagnosis and treatment for cancer. When she became too ill, she asked Gina to take on me and my proposal for the last round. Gina read the entire proposal and sample chapters that very night – she was a super-fast reader – and we immediately began a tradition of mutual support.

Although we both wrote about sex, our approaches were as different as our personalities – but somehow it all worked brilliantly for us. Once we finished getting out her last book, just weeks before her death, she told me that she had said all she had to say and was ready to go. 

Gina was an award-winning pioneer in the field of sexology and a tireless advocate for everyone’s right to sexual well-being. For her 1994 (blockbuster) book Women Who Love Sex, she conducted qualitative instead of quantitative research. What that means is that instead of asking, as male sexologists always had, How many orgasms did you have? Gina asked, What gives you the most pleasure? Even Oprah Winfrey was curious about Gina’s groundbreaking work and hosted her on her show.

Gina went on to publish 13 books and countless articles, and to create a unique therapeutic system called the 4-Dimensional Wheel. She built a large international community that supports its teaching and growth, the 4-D Network (www.4-DNetwork.com).

As soon as she died, her closest people performed a ritual that Gina had arranged with them in detail, and then several others of us were invited to come break bread, listen to the gentle drumming of her drumming circle, and look at her body. She was wrapped in the expensive linen sheets she and Jo had splurged on decades ago, only to discover that they weren’t comfortable. Jo pulled them out of storage for the occasion and the linen wrapping was closed with several of Gina’s favorite scarves. This was the first time I was ever in the same room as a dead friend, chatting with others who loved her, and it seemed just right.

To learn more about Gina and her work, visit her website here: www.GinaOgden.com

Seven Words in February, 2025 (in 100 words)

I wrote a short story of 100 words exactly that includes the 7 banned words the government forbid the Center for Disease Control to use. It takes place in the future:

Rosie felt vulnerable. She thought her maternity care coverage was paid for with her $3,000 monthly insurance fee, but President T. Rump had signed away this entitlement by executive order. Only white Christian women in heterosexual marriages who owned property could access care for their fetus and themselves, justified by an “evidence-based” study of racial superiority. The other pregnant American women were subject to a diversity of exclusions. Transgender folks had to choose between child-bearing and identity. Despite science-based conclusions of their excellent parenting, lesbians like Rosie were forbidden access to IVF or adoption. Luckily, her partner was a midwife.

My Dad the ex-Trucker on his 100th birthday in 100 words

It would be my dad's 100th birthday today. In his honor, I have written 100 words about him, about learning to drive, about how complicated family relationships are.

My ex-trucker dad taught me how to drive in 1964 in his black ’53 Ford with the red seats. I practiced his technique of how to mount a hill, using the clutch to deal with intersections, but I chickened out towards the top. As I ran the stop sign, I crashed into the side of a police cruiser. The cops leaped out. “Sauly!” they cried when they saw him. “Your kid? Never mind. We’ll take care of it.” My dad was a Pittsburgh lifer and everyone – especially me – adored him. So why didn’t he stop his wife from beating me?

I lost NYT's 13-Word Love Story Contest

The NY Times had a 13-Word Love Story Contest in honor of 13 years of their Modern Love column. I submitted a story. Last night they published a bunch of winners (out of 10,000 submissions). Once I read through them - so middle class, so granola - I realized that mine was WAY outside of their point of view. Compare it to the ones they liked - full of "BMW" and "craft beer" and "organic mac and cheese.

"Here's mine.

The start? Her twinkling nose stud. The end? The revolver under her pillow.

Look at the winners here.

Obituary for the film “Obit”

Despite the excited buzz everywhere about the new documentary “Obit,” centering on the obituary journalists of the New York Times, I am sorry to say that the film killed itself today. A gaggle of white men dug the grave for a trickle of elite white men over whom a selection of white men gave eulogies.

I have written many letters to many editors over the years in which I say, “Whew. It seems that only white men die in your world.” I scan with rare success for the odd mention of the life of a person of color or a white woman in the hallowed pages of our premiere newspapers. But when you see the film “Obit” you understand why. White editors sit around assigning obituaries to white male journalists and none of them notice that something is awry.

The solitary woman on the obit team, Margalit Fox, is the only one in the film to touch on the subject, and she does so with a couple of incomprehensible sentences about how the people dying now were raised 60+ years ago and so times were different and it will take another generation for people of color and women to be making enough of a mark to rate a place in their paper. (!) Clumsy and convoluted and plain wrong.

A whole film on obituaries and there isn’t a single serious discussion of how and why subjects are selected or how the race and gender of the selectors might just be impacting the list of those whose lives are written about.

The only Black NYT employee we see – and that for just a few seconds – is during footage of a NYT editorial meeting. At that table is a Black man who, I discover in the credits, is Earl Wilson, an editorial desk assistant. We are shown celebrity subjects of color receiving obituaries, such as Michael Jackson and Prince and Whitney, but not scientists, politicians, or even athletes. The unexplained, unconnected photos of MLK edited into the visuals are bewildering as there is no narrative about any obit for him. The film is more excluding than the NYT itself.

As for women subjects, why the very first one named by “Obit” is the highly accomplished Candy Barr, a stripper who died in 2005. Thanks for highlighting our sheros. Nothing against Candy Barr (who has an interesting back story the film does not mention: she is also known, according to Wikipedia, for “shooting her estranged second husband; and being arrested and sentenced to a prison term for drug possession”), but the film might have mentioned anyone from Fannie Lou Hamer to Shirley Chisholm to Adrienne Rich.

The longest segment about a single obit subject focuses on John Fairfax, some white British adventurer who rowed across oceans and died in 2012. Why was he the film’s highlight? Why not others who died that same year (Etta James, Eve Arnold, Earl Scruggs – to name three)?

There were some scenes in the “morgue” – where clippings and drafts of obituaries for the still-living are stored in a chaotic crypt that one awkward white man works alone. He seems overwhelmed and startled when he opens random file drawers.

At the end of the film – after we’ve been subjected to talking head followed by talking head, everyone one of them a white man except for Fox – we are assaulted with a rapid-fire montage of images of life – random unidentified children playing, people ambulating, others laughing, jumping from era to era with no explanation or justification. My impression is that this was done to demonstrate inclusiveness, as not a few of this hodgepodge of images involves all those who are not at the NYT obituary-writing table. Sorry “Obit”: Not enough.

My final verdict. “Obit” is a lost opportunity. It is peculiar, but not in a pleasant or especially informative way. And it says soooooo much that we already knew about the New York Times.

The trailer:

 

The 411 on Weekly Planners

So, my dear friend who works in a stationary shop across the country offered to buy me a 2017 planner for my birthday, but even with photos, I couldn’t really pick one out from a distance. Same with the Internet. I need to feel the heft, to make sure the essential spiral binding works smoothly, to check if the cover is hardy enough to withstand going from my desk to bag to suitcase, to being taken out and put back a gazillion times over the year. Hopefully the paper doesn’t bleed through and it is light enough not to ruin my back when I’m carrying it.

Last year I got my 2016 planner from Ocean State Job Lots for $2 and it worked well for me until about September when it started feeling overworked, shabby, not so neat. Pages curled, the cover got wrinkled. It is really looking forward to retirement at the end of the year.

I do everything online except for my Planner. It’s my daily anchor: my appointments, my to-do list, my phone notes, my deadlines, my reminders. I’ve used one all of my adult life and know exactly which kind suits me.

I tried an independent bookstore first. They had well over a dozen, all of them arty, with one page full of an image on their theme (women authors or cats or birds or meditation sayings) and the facing page squeezing the week into tight horizontal slots. Half the weight and half the space is taken up by the kind of pretty pictures you could Google for.

I went to the big drug store but either those planners were too floppy or the cover was hard and awkward. I bought one but returned it when I realized how heavy it was.

Then I looked online at Target and saw what a big selection they had. I drove many miles to the largest Target within an hour’s drive. They had plenty of choice for weekly planners, but most of them were attractively designed to be difficult. One had the dates written in gold – I could only read them by holding them under the light and twisting the book this way or that to catch the glare. Another had everything in script that look all very calligraphy but impossible to decipher in a glance. In the end I bought one that is plain, not an ounce of decoration, but with a strong enough font that I can actually tell what’s written on it.

One more beef. Every 12 month planner should be 13 months at least and include the December of the previous year so that we can make a smooth transition without lugging two volumes. If they want to be extravagant, designers could include January of the following year as well.

Those designers who waste the majority of each page’s space on baubles and fireworks clearly don’t depend on planners like I do. I want a workhorse. The essential thing is that it gets the job done, although I do wish this one were prettier.  If you have a sticker I’d love to slap on the front, send it my way!

Only men sit

I need a new office chair. I’m a writer, so I’m in my computer chair about 12 hours a day. The last one I inherited from a friend who died. Now 6 or 7 years later, I suddenly realize there is no seat left. I’m just sitting on the metal under-structure.

The only place that sells decent chairs for under $500 seems to be Staples. Despite my pressing need, I have visited three different Staples branches to try their chairs again and again, without buying one. Why? Because apparently the chair manufacturers have not been informed that women ever sit down. And because they think every man is 6’ tall.

There are at least three results from the fact that the designers and engineers are probably all men:

1) Out of 20 chairs that I tried in Staples, 13 did not lower low enough for me to really plant my feet on the ground. Some of them didn’t lower enough for me to touch anything but my toes to the ground. I’m now 5’2” – that is not so far out of human range to be excluded from a seat.

2) The seats in over half of the chairs are too big, especially from back to knee. If I sit all the way back, my legs don’t bend over the edge.

3) The arm rests are built for arms that hang down from shoulders that are much wider than mine. So the most I can do is rest my forearms on the inner edge of the arm rests, which is very uncomfortable.

All I want is to find something small, compact, comfortable, and healthy. I’ve got my credit card ready. I want to buy. And yet, I have still not found a fitting place to deposit my butt.

Murder Under the Bridge: a Palestine Mystery By Kate Jessica Raphael (Book Review)

Murder Under the Bridge is a compelling and unique murder mystery. Written by Kate Jessica Raphael, an American with intimate knowledge of Palestine under Israeli occupation, this novel provides a glimpse behind the Wall dividing Palestine from the rest of the world. The action begins when Rania, a Palestinian woman police detective, discovers the body of a woman stranger on the outskirts of her village. The magic is not only in the message, but in the medium as well: a detective thriller is a palatable and effective way to reveal the minutia of the lives that the Conflict distorts. The author delves into the intricacies of relationships across genders, ethnicities, nationalities, generations, and most of all, the Occupiers and the Occupied.

The richness of the book is in the details, from the taxi system in Israel and Palestine, to the checkpoints that inflict daily humiliation on the residents of the West Bank. Raphael explores the subtleties by which trust and community are solidified or dismantled. By interjecting snippets of Arabic and Hebrew (immediately translated, but a glossary is included at the back of the book), we get insight into how knowledge of these two languages, along with English, plays out in the power struggles under Occupation. For example, Rania does not let on that she understands Hebrew, giving her a slight edge in conversations with her Israeli counterparts.

Prison is an ever-present and defining fact of life in Palestine, generation after generation. One prisoner Fareed, when accepting coffee from a jailer, “tried not to hate himself for his weakness. He had grown up on the stories of his father’s interrogations.” Betrayal and manipulation compound the struggle of people, especially women, to live their lives. Raphael manages to convey all of this without, for one second, lecturing. It flows from the action and the graphic descriptions.

Kate Jessica Raphael’s political and creative life changed after she spent eighteen months between 2002 and 2005 volunteering in Palestine through the International Women's Peace Service. During the writing of this, her first novel, she augmented her closely observed impressions with, she says, “the work of Israeli feminist and labor groups … and a detailed map of the area.” Raphael’s tasks as a volunteer included documenting human rights violations and accompanying Palestinians in their daily chores, using her international status to protect them. Out of Raphael’s intimacy with the Palestinian community comes this illuminating, exciting detective thriller that opens with a Murder Under the Bridge.

Challenging the Big Academic Press Worked for Me

May I brag? I got this email from the kind and communicative Managing Editor of the only academic journal I ever published in: “The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture,” from the large publisher Taylor & Francis, which publishes scads of academic journals. He wrote:

“We've recently compiled our publication data over the past seven years and thought you might be interested in the positive results. We're happy to report that your article, "Women’s Liberation Explosion At Boston University (1969–70),"  published in our 2014, 7.1 edition remains very popular and was one of our top ten most downloaded articles from Taylor & Francis in 2014… We're very happy to see the popularity of the article, and hope you will be as well. Thanks so much for your contribution to the Journal!”

But here’s what I’m really proud of. Academic journals and book publishers offer the most appalling contracts to writers of almost all publications. The journals don’t pay. They ask you to indemnify them against any legal challenges. They demand to hold the copyright of your work. And then they put your essay behind a paywall which means that it is only read by students and faculty of the universities that pay them for access.

I was approached by one of the editors about using my piece and was pretty happy about the idea of being included in the ivory tower for once – until, that is, I saw the contract. Since a contract is something that is negotiated between two parties – despite publications telling you “this is our standard document” – I started negotiating with them (with some support from my union's brilliant contract advisers.)

I told them that I would only indemnify them up to the amount they paid me: zero. I told them they could not own the copyright unless they were buying the piece outright, which wasn’t happening. I told them that I refuse to have my (unpaid) writing, about building a revolutionary movement, no less, behind a paywall.

To their credit, they agreed to all of it, every single counter-request, and the result is that people can actually get to my essay and read it. I know that the stakes are higher for people who make their living in the academic realm, but writers be advised: If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

You may have already read my piece, but if not, feel free – literally – to click here.