Some time in the aughts, I made a hard and fast rule for myself: no more service journalism. Now, I’m suddenly back at it for New York Magazine’s The Strategist section, and I’m really enjoying the gig—and feeling good about it.

***

Back in the 2000s, I was trying to establish myself as more of a serious journalist, the kind who covered important issues like gentrification and green-washing, and also as a personal essayist.

Before that, I’d spent much of my career saying “yes” to whatever assignments came my way in order to stay afloat, and to keep myself on editors’ lists. Frequently that meant writing about fashion, health, beauty, and home furnishings in a way designed to help readers decide which brands to buy products and services from.

I felt embarrassed by that work, and ashamed that those were the kids of assignments I was mostly offered, especially when I did them for women’s magazines with retrograde names like Good Housekeeping and Ladies’ Home Journal.

It felt shallow to me, and too closely tied to my work writing for trade publications such as Body Fashions/Intimate Apparel, Women’s Wear Daily (WWD), Home Furnishings Network, The Daily News Record (the menswear version of WWD), Fashion Jewelry Plus!, Accessories Magazine, and others—a nine-year rut I’d gotten myself stuck in from 1987 to 1996.

As a reporter on the accessories beat, my first of several jobs at WWD, I sometimes got to write in-depth investigations of issues like the proliferation of counterfeit accessories sold on the streets—reporting on who was making and selling them, how luxury brands like Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Rolex were fighting back, and how law enforcement was handling the matter. Those were satisfying to work on. They felt like they mattered.

But more often than not, I was tasked with writing “In the Markets” reports on what styles of things manufacturers were featuring for the next season. The shorthand we used in the office was “ITM.” As in, “Sari, for next week, can you do an ‘ITM’ on some of the accessories firms now producing vests?” Et voila:

For those pieces I’d ride the subway from Union Square (WWD was on East 12th Street back then) into “the market,” aka the accessories district in Manhattan, which, at least in the late 80s when I started at WWD, was along Sixth Avenue in the 30s, just east of the regular garment district on Seventh Avenue. There, I’d visit the offices of various brands, talk with their media reps, and pick up their samples that fit into whatever trend I was covering.

While I was in the neighborhood, I’d probably also hit up a sample sale that I’d read about in Elysa Lazar’s The S&B Report and waste my hard earned money on whatever was the least ugly, most affordable item on offer. There was something about taking cash out of an ATM, then putting yourself in a room filled floor-to-ceiling with “bargains” that made you feel like you had to leave with something.

Then I’d head back to the office and deliver the samples to the art department, where veteran illustrators like Steven Stipelman, Robert Passantino, and in this case Robert Melendez, would draw renderings of one or more of those pieces.

I found those assignments tedious, and also meaningless. I gathered that industry people reading the paper might have gotten some ideas from them about coming trends. But their greater function seemed to be placating the brands that were covered, who sometimes advertised. I hated that.

***

In the early aughts, I found a way to merge service journalism with memoiristic writing. I reached out to an old WWD colleague who was now the Editor-in-Chief of Time Out NY, and I pitched her some reported personal essays. I’d tell a little bit of my own story, then bring in the voices others with related stories, around a topic for which there were products or services available. I wound up writing a number of these for the magazine’s “Chill Out” section.

I enjoyed working on those pieces, and was much prouder of them than say, the article I wrote for Women’s Health magazine about clever dieting tricks like placing lower calorie foods in the front of your fridge and cabinets so that they’d be easier to grab. I was sad when that gig ended, after Time Out became more of just an entertainment listings rag.

Soon afterward, New York Magazine revamped service journalism, and made it more compelling and useful. I credit my talented former WWD colleague and dear friend Janet Ozzard with the first phase of that. She was an editor there, and I don’t think they were calling the section The Strategist yet, but it was the same idea. She and her team made the magazine’s fashion, beauty, and home furnishings coverage so appealing, I’d pore over it, online and in print. They reframed service journalism as a kind of problem-solving, and that made it seem, at least to me, so much more respectable and valuable.

Janet gave me a few assignments when she was there—for example, a roundup of fashionable bras for markedly busty women like me, who wanted prettier underthings than the utilitarian harnesses that once dominated that part of the market. It was a chance to disseminate helpful information that I, and people like me, could use, and I felt very good about it. (And it tapped some of the knowledge I’d accrued at Body Fashions/Intimate Apparel, the first publication I worked at when I was just out of college.) That work shifted my attitude about service journalism, at least for outlets like New York.

And so I was happy when Ailbhe Malone, an editor at The Strategist, reached out to me last winter to see if I was interested in writing some pieces for that section. The angle she was interested in was which things, in any particular category, appealed to me now that I’m living in a 60-year-old (wrinkly, lumpy, arthritic, [although she didn’t say those things]) body, and also trying to finally learn to dress like a grownup. Basically, the Oldster angle.

It was another opportunity for me to merge personal essay writing with reporting from a more practical angle, a mix I can now really get with. And because I’m encouraged by my editors to be truthful about what works and what doesn’t in the products I try, I don’t ever feel like I’m shilling.

So far I’ve written about:

1. chic but orthopedically sound clogs,

2. bathing suits that flatter and support soft older bodies,

3. “lifestyle” sneakers that both look and feel good.

I’ve got a couple of other pieces in the works for them, and I hope I get to keep going with this. I really like this gig. And I’m glad I changed my mind about this type of writing.

Where to find my other work:

• Oldster Magazine—and the New York Times article about it.

• Memoir Land

• My books

• The audio version of my memoir.

• My website.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure and honor of speaking before the 100 or so participants in the Columbia Publishing Course, a prestigious six-week summer program for those aspiring to careers in book, magazine, and digital publishing.

Although it’s been around for 78 years, I only first heard about CPC a few years ago when a colleague mentioned it in something she wrote, and revealed that several other colleagues of mine had attended, too. All of those colleagues had benefitted from the excellent connections the course provided, and gone on to have great work opportunities right out of the gate. It made me wish I’d known about the course when I was coming up, and had developed those kind of useful contacts.

***

I was flattered when one of the program’s administrators reached out to invite me to speak on the topic of “Why this brand? Why now?” and asked me to talk about both and .

Weirdly, before receiving that request I hadn’t at all thought of Oldster and Memoir Land in those terms. I thought of them simply as publications, and myself as a writer/editor/sometime-journalist. It made me realize that if I’ve been creating branding that reliably conveys what it is I’m offering, I’ve been doing it somewhat unconsciously.

As I worked on my presentation I had to pause and really think about what I wanted to say to a group who’d already been learning how to brand media properties from other professionals, who actually knew what they were talking about. It meant reviewing and deconstructing a process I’d engaged in five years ago sort of inadvertently, without having thought much about it.

In my preparation I reflected on other properties I’ve created over the years, primarily my books, and realized I kind of have an innate affinity for this—and also, to answer the “why now?” part of the assignment, a knack for good timing.

For instance, the first edition of Goodbye to All That landed in the fall of 2013, a time when there had been such a spike in gentrification in New York City that the day before my pub date, David Byrne published an essay in The Guardian in which he wrote about considering leaving Manhattan if striving artists could no longer afford to live there. (Of course, it’s only gotten worse since then, which created the right conditions for a reissue in 2021, with seven new essays.)

I launched Oldster at the end of August, 2021, just before the cultural conversation turned to perimenopause and menopause in a huge way, and at a time when most aging-related media was still limited to women 40 and older. It made it so that my little age- and gender-agnostic magazine, “Exploring what it means to travel through time in a human body, at every phase of life,” was a refreshing alternative that appealed to a number of demographics (Boomers, Gen X, Edler Millennials) who were all hitting new aging benchmarks without much to guide them.

I realized that what had guided me—toward everything that has worked—were two ingredients: curiosity and anxiety. It seems that when I follow my curiosity, particularly on subjects around which I also have some anxiety, I succeed.

I’ve learned that the questions that dog me most are also dogging other people: Was it a mistake to leave NYC? Could I have somehow stayed after we got evicted? How have other people dealt with being evicted from NYC apartments and finding they could no longer afford to live in their favorite city? Am I in step with my peers? Or completely off-track? Do other people contain different versions of themselves at different ages, at all times? Etc. When those kinds of questions inform what I create, what I create apparently resonates with others.

I wrote this all up—including the part about my successes being sort of happy accidents—and turned it into a 30-minute talk that I delivered in a small auditorium at the Columbia University School of Journalism. The students responded well and asked lots of great follow-up questions, which I was glad to discover I could answer off the cuff and organically.

***

One question took me by surprise. A young woman asked why I’d decided to publish Oldster and Memoir Land on Substack, and not via a traditional journalism outlet, or an established digital platform. Did this woman, and perhaps others in the crowd, not know that our entire field was collapsing—er, had just about fully collapsed?

As I began to explain that, one of the administrators in the back crossed her arms back and forth at me as if to say “Stop!” But I’d already gotten rolling, and it would have been weird to pause and backtrack. Also, dishonest.

While I didn’t say outright that publishing was dead, or that each week I read about more of my friends and colleagues getting laid off, I told the truth. I can’t recall my exact words, but I said something about it being increasingly difficult to find lasting work in what are shrinking industries. That there have always been more aspirants than opportunities, and now, for a variety of reasons, the opportunities are increasingly fewer and fewer.

At the end, the administrator found me and said, “It’s like telling a child they’re going to die. Eventually they are. But between now and then, a lot of other good things can happen.”

Still, she thanked me. As have many of the students, in emails they sent—with their resumes attached. The course clearly taught them to network with contacts! And I am now one of those.

According to the program’s website, “Although course graduates are not guaranteed job placement, 95% of the program’s alumni find positions in the publishing industry.” I hope for the students that that still holds true, even in these dark, uncertain publishing times.

Where to find my other work:

• Oldster Magazine

• Memoir Land

• My books

• The audio version of my memoir.

• My website.

How’s this for meta?: What I’m about to describe to you, I’m also experiencing with regard to this post.

Since the minute the idea for it came to me a week or so ago, I have felt like a failure for not having yet produced it. This is how it’s consistently been for me since early in my career—which, mind you, began in 1986, forty years ago, the year before I graduated college, when I started writing professionally.

Give me an assignment, any assignment (a good number of them I give myself these days) and before I’ve even had a chance to consider angles or sources, in my mind I’ve already failed. From the get-go there’s a familiar refrain of Why haven’t you done this (perfectly) yet? with a clock ticking so loudly in the background it sounds like an angry drumbeat.

The volume has escalated to new heights now that I’ve signed on for some big, exciting projects—an anthology, to be published by HarperOne in fall of 2027, and an Oldster Podcast, to be launched this fall, for which I have tapped my podcast-junkie, audio engineer husband to serve as executive producer.

I’m so thrilled to get to do these things. I feel so impossibly fortunate, I sometimes have to stop and ask myself if this is all really happening. But I’m also actively beating myself up for not yet having these (big!) projects already ready to go. And we are not even anywhere near an kind of deadline on either of them!

This is a strange, counter-intuitive way in which I “motivate” myself. And although it seems to have worked for me for four decades and counting, it needs to stop. It’s taking a terrible toll on me, emotionally, and interfering with my already dodgy sleep. I need to stop being my own mean, scary boss.

Somehow I never even realized this was something I did until now, when I’ve added to the slate significant expectations of myself. But looking back I see that it’s how I’ve operated over and over, from the beginning.

I think I know where it comes from: In high school and college certain adults (not mentioning any names) called me an “under-achiever.” I had so much “unrealized potential,” they said. If only I would “apply” myself.

My home life had turned chaotic, though, and it cost me the ability to focus. I was being shuttled back and forth every week between two different homes, an hour (and worlds) apart, and worrying about the wellbeing of certain inhabitants of both of them.

Once I left school and entered the work world, I became obsessed with countering the under-achiever narrative. That and the chaos and precariousness of my chosen field—plus actual mean, scary bosses—turned me into the opposite of what they called me; I became an “over-achiever.”

I’m sure what I’m about to write is at least somewhat unhealthy, but…I kind of like being an over-achiever…? This might be the workahol talking, but I really don’t want to stop being one.

But I’d like to find a different way to keep arriving at that, one in which I’m not a complete jerk toward myself.

Step one: Devise a way to not beat myself up for not having figured that out yet.

Where to find my other work:

• Oldster Magazine

• Memoir Land

• My books

• The audio version of my memoir.

• My website.

A funny thing keeps happening: Just before podcast interviewers hit “record,” they ask me how to pronounce my name. I offer an easy mnemonic. “It’s pronounced like ‘Larry Cotton,’” I say. “SAH-ree BOH-ton, like Larry Cotton.” Sometimes I add, “My first name has a Long Island ‘aaahhh’” to be cute.

They thank me—then proceed to mangle it anyway, in any number of all too familiar ways.

“Sorry Baton” is probably the most common. I get that people mistakenly think “Sari” sounds like the Indian dress, and that “Botton” sounds like the thing majorettes throw in the air, or conductors wield before orchestras. Still annoying, though.

The worst is “Sorry Bottom.” I mean…

When I worked at Fairchild Publications from the late ’80s to the mid-’90s, a photo editor there kept telling photographers assigned to work with me to go meet up with “Sally Buttons.” Friends from that time still jokingly call me that. I have affection for that one, since I’m named for my late grandmother, Sarah, who went by Sally. My parents mashed the two together, phonetically, to arrive at “Sari.”

***

A most humiliating permutation hit my ears at the 2023 Poets & Writers gala at Chelsea Piers. Having been featured in the magazine’s 2022 edition of the “5 Over 50” debut authors for my memoir, I was one of the evening’s many honorees. They told us in advance that at a certain point during the presentation, they’d call our names out loud, and when they did, we should stand up.

Just before that was to happen, in the bathroom I bumped into a former agent of mine from the aughts, someone I’d had to sue over her mishandling of a ghostwriting contract, and of whom I am not fond.

“What are you doing here, Sari?” she asked with the most obnoxious fake smile. “I’m one of the honorees, _____,” I said, brandishing a fake smile of my own. I couldn’t wait for her to hear my name announced from the stage.

A half-hour later, when the presenter got to me, she called out “SAY-rye BOAT-on!” before event’s the 500 guests. [Sad trombone sound.] My mother, who I’d brought as my plus one, looked crestfallen. “Is that supposed to be you?” (I suppose I could blame her for saddling me with this problem.)

So much for the fuck-you to my former agent.

***

So, yeah, this isn’t a new problem. It’s happened all my life.

As a kid I hated my name for this reason, and also because in the ’70s when prefab vanity tooth brushes and bicycle license plates and place mats started showing up in stores with only common names printed on them, the closest I could get was “Sara” or “Sarah” or “Shari.” Everyone was already mistakenly—annoyingly—calling me those, so I wasn’t interested.

I was a musical theater kid, and at 10 or 11 I decided that when I grew up, I’d take on the pseudonym “Barbara Sutton,” just to avoid people constantly mispronouncing my real name. Well, also because I thought it sounded classy.

When I played house, I was always “Jill” or “Susan” or “Lori.” Something normal. I only wanted to feel normal, which I never have, in so many categories.

***
Years later, at a copywriting gig, my boss just could not get my name right. That’s when I came up with the “Larry Cotton” analogy.

“John,” I said, after several months of answering to just about anything with an S, “let me help you out—it’s pronounced like Larry Cotton.”

From then on, that’s what he called me—Larry Cotton. I didn’t mind. After so many years of “Sorry” and the like, this was something different. And a little bit funny. Not that it helps…

Where to find my other work:

• Oldster Magazine

• Memoir Land

• My books

• The audio version of my memoir.

• My website.

After reading Kasia Pilat’s recent profile and me and in the New York Times, some people have reached out to tell me they’re concerned about my working 70 hours per week. The truth is, working that number of hours—and sometimes more, if I’m being honest—is just standard Sari operating practice, and has been for most of my career.

I’m a life-long juggler, or hustler, or whatever you want to call me. This has been out of a combination of 1) financial necessity, 2) attempts to change lanes from a career where I worked full-time toward a different one that I could only get ahead in by working additional gigs on the side, and 3) my deriving great satisfaction, and dare I say joy, from achievement, especially with the parts of my work that I like the most.

From my late 20s until my late 30s, I juggled that much work while also, shall we say, volunteering many additional hours as a nursemaid for a string of difficult men I should never have gotten involved with. That unpaid emotional labor, which—my bad—I took on 100% of my own volition, was the most exhausting job of all. The only good thing about that period was learning just how capable I can be. And also what a waste of time that was.

Right now the work is sustaining me financially—finally—but there were times over the years when despite working 70 or more hours per week, I barely had enough money to live on. So often I was ghostwriting books for unfamous or not-that-famous people while also adjuncting at universities and freelancing as a writer. It was demanding and tiring—I feel exhausted just writing those words—and none of it paid sufficiently, so I was always behind the eight ball, money-wise. I reasoned that it was all necessary, because I was using the only skills I had, and I was trying to establish myself better in some of those areas—I was paying my dues.

What else would I have done for work, anyway? As little money as I was making, I didn’t have other ways to command more.

***

This morning, after reading about home heating oil prices hitting as much as $5.50 per gallon in some places, I thought about a time when despite both of us working crazy hours, Brian and I could no longer afford to heat—and therefore live in—our former house in Rosendale, N.Y.

I was a year out from finishing a ghostwriting project for the very stingy spouse of a celebrity, who’d found me when I was desperate for a gig. I was also teaching two courses per semester at SUNY Albany, grading 50 papers a week, and putting most of my measly adjunct paycheck into my gas tank, for an hour-plus ride in each direction, twice a week. On top of that I was freelancing for various publications, some of which paid as little as $50 a piece.

When home heating oil prices hit $4.25 and gasoline went up to over $3.25/gallon at the pump, we could no longer afford our life as we knew it. We started paying our oil bills with a high-interest credit card and paying off only the minimum each month. The cheap health insurance I was getting from my adjunct job couldn’t offset the high price of gassing up for five hours of driving each week, so I decided not to go back in 2012. (It turned out to be a good move. I will never miss grading 50 undergraduate papers per week for a pittance.)

At first, to offset the rising cost of living, Brian and I decided to take in a boarder. We found a guy on Craigslist who seemed great on paper. Then, the first day he spent in our house I overheard him talking loudly on the phone, saying disgustingly sexist things about some woman he knew. Then he took a shower with some kind of strawberry artificially-scented soap or shampoo that made the entire house smell as if a Twizzlers factory had exploded. For 24 hours we could not escape that smell. Finally, that night, after being told to use the downstairs bathroom—that the upstairs bathroom was Brian’s and mine, exclusively—I found myself falling into the toilet at 2am because he’d used our bathroom, and left the seat up.

The next morning we kindly informed him it wasn’t going to work out, offered him a month for free, and told him to find another place to move.

Next we considered converting the house into a two-family, so it could become an income property. But the construction necessary for that would have required us to go into greater debt. Taking on an expensive project like that with the aim of saving money made zero sense.

Finally, we got the idea to rent out the entire house and downsize to a smaller place. We found a commercial/residential loft in Kingston for about $1000 less per month than our home cost us, and got tenants for the house.

It wasn’t easy. We were going from 1800 square feet to 1000, which meant getting rid of a lot of our belongings. We had a massive yard sale, at the end of which we donated six carloads to a local nonprofit school that was about to have a fundraising bazaar. It was so painful and scary, parting ways with our stuff, and our first home—the home we’d so hopefully bought together when we got married in 2005.

But then we discovered we preferred living in Kingston. And somehow, our hard work started paying us better, and gradually we got on our feet. In 2018, when we were getting kicked out of that loft, we bought a foreclosure in midtown Kingston for under market value, and sold the Rosendale house to our second set of tenants. It all worked out.

But here we go again. This senseless war is causing oil prices to soar, and you-know-who stated yesterday that they are not likely to go down before the midterm elections. Right know we’re doing okay, but I worry that we could at some point find ourselves in the same predicament we did in 2011.

I worry, too, about other people right now who might lose their ability to afford their homes, thanks to this nonsense. It’s so unnecessary, and so unfair. So infuriating and terrifying. And like so much else right now, just completely unconscionable.

Where to find my other work:

• Oldster Magazine

• Memoir Land

• My books

• The audio version of my memoir.

• My website.

Greetings, subscribers old and new. For the uninitiated, while I publish pretty much daily at and , here I publish more like once or twice a month. This is my personal blog where I post as I have time, or things on my mind that don’t really belong in my “magazines.”

***

This post comes while I’m in the midst of a fairly euphoric and dizzying moment. In case you missed it, earlier this month The New York Times published a feature on Oldster and me, and it has completely rocked my world, in mostly good ways. (Actually, the only negative so far is the time spent playing email whack-a-mole, now that I’ve been receiving about 500 notes a day.)

As if having The New York Times publish a feature on me weren’t validating enough, many people reacted to it in a way that made it additionally so. Consistently they emailed, texted, and commented: “Finally!”

This is a little on the nose considering the story is about my work on a publication about getting older and the passage of time, but I’ve been waiting so long for this moment; for a major outlet to recognize my hard work, work I’ve long believed was truly good, and newsworthy. I mean, I’ve had some exciting career highlights over the years—essays in some splashy places; books published and mentioned in publications of note—but nothing quite like this.

I was never certain this would happen, despite my dogged efforts to get my message across to the right people. What I did believe, though—what I forced myself to believe—was that it was always a possibility. On every front, throughout my career, no matter how many times I might have been rejected or sidelined, I knew I needed to hang in there and keep trying because mabye eventually it would be my turn.

I don’t remember where I first heard the phrase I’ve relied on to keep me moving forward:

“No” just means “not right now.”

But those words have been knocking around my head since at least my mid-20s, when I started trying to publish personal essays on the side while I toiled in the boring trade magazine trenches.

Maybe it was my first husband, a salesman, to whom I was married from 23 to 26, who spewed motivational business slogans like a wind-up toy. Maybe it was the mentor I had in the ‘90s, who taught her students to make an index card for each essay submission with the word “NO” written on it 19 times, and “YES” as the 20th word. If you didn’t sell your piece by the 20th try, you made a fresh index card and proceeded accordingly.

Maybe it was all that “abundance” talk in the 90s, assuring us that The Universe stored enough good stuff for everyone to receive their fair share of it, in time.

Or maybe it was something I learned by having my birth-order shift again and again, after my parents divorced and remarried, my mother multiple times. In my family of origin I was the first born. I recall my father referring to me as “mi primera” in a note of congratulations for something—a good report card, a role in a school play—I can’t remember what. In my first 11 years of life, I had the opportunity to do all kinds of things before my little sister, four years younger than me, just as a matter of course.

But then, beginning when I was 12, my parents each got remarried to people who had children older than me, and I was no longer at the front of any line. I had to learn to wait my turn for everything. Sometimes I felt bitter, but somewhere along the way I learned that I preferrred feeling hopeful that the wheel of fortune would eventually come around to me, especially if I kept my eye (and my efforts) on the prize.

I also learned that if I wanted people—siblings, colleagues, friends—to be happy for me, I’d have to find a way to be happy for them. I’ve now been in publishing and media in varying capacities for forty years, and all that time I have maintained a practice of celebrating others’ triumphs, even helping others toward those triumphs, while continually working towards mine. I think that’s helped keep me relatively sane.

It’s also how literary citizenship works. There’s no downside, I’ve found, the cheering others on while aiming for the same goals they might have arrived at sooner. Literary citizenship is a good party to be at, even when you’re not the guest of honor. I’m always recommending to aspiring writers that they attend readings and other events, make friends with other writers, join writers’ groups. I still do these things, and always find myself inspired by other writers’ work and their publishing stories. I also learn about opportunities this way, and connect with people who might be good to work with or learn from.

To quote the New York State Lottery ads, you’ve got to be in it to win it. (Although maybe that’s not the best line for me to cite given my habit of rarely checking my lottery tickets because I don’t want to find out if I’ve lost.)

Sure, envy sometimes rears its head, especially when it seems everyone is getting to the finish line faster than I am, or when I’m celebrating someone else’s success right after I’ve been turned down for something. That’s when I remind myself of that phrase I learned a long time ago—“No just means “not right now.”—which is currently bearing out.

In other news…

I got to chat with Robin Young on NPR’s Here & Now.

I wrote a piece for ’s The Strategist about shopping for orthopedic but chic clogs after giving away all my wooden-heeled ones.

Where to find my other work:

• Oldster Magazine

• Memoir Land

• My books

• The audio version of my memoir.

• My website.

It’s a good thing there are photos, video, and audio from last Wednesday’s Oldster Variety Hour at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan, because I barely remember being onstage and performing.

As happened when I put on the first edition of this cabaret in Kingston in October, just before showtime I went into a sort of adrenaline-fueled fugue state, a mindset and neurochemical condition that put me on auto-pilot so I could get the job done. It allowed me to override a debilitating case of the WHO THE HELL DO I THINK I AMs and the latest reprisal of The World’s Longest Cold, from which I’ve been suffering on and off since mid-February. I have no real memory of either performance.

The week before the show my friend Ross Rice came over to rehearse the two songs he’d be acompaniying me on (Diahnne Abbott’s version of “Honey Suckle Rose,” and Diana Ross’s version of “When We Grow Up” from Free to Be, You and Me…) I was sniffly, and my voice cracked multiple times, which really freaked me out. But I assured myself that my cold was almost over, and that my vocal chords would recover by show day. Just in case, I had Ross take the songs down a full step. (He’s one of those musical geniuses for whom it’s no big thing to—on the spot—transpose a song into another key.)

I’d almost fully recovered that Saturday, but then Sunday night, boom, the goddamned cold came rolling back in a big way. Once again I had a head full of snot, and for the first time since the cold first appeared, I had laryngitis. When I tried to rehearse with Brian a duet we’d be ending the night with a capella, I could barely skwawk out a full lyric audibly. Surely I was fucked.

In the absence of prescription steriods, my adrenal glands just manufactured their own.

Ironically, 37 years prior, my cantor dad came down with larygnitis just in time for his performance of “The Song of Songs,” an opera based on the biblical love story of King Solomon and his bride, composed by Elizabeth Swados and commissioned for my dad by Joe Papp—for whom Joe’s Pub is named. I’ll never forget that May, 1989 performance, for which he ultimately had to whisper all his lyrics because he zero voice. He’d tried everything from steroids to B12 shots to no avail. It’s one of the most horrifying memories of his career.

It didn’t occur to me until Tuesday morning to hit my doctor up for a corisone shot or Medrol pack, and by then it was too late. Brian and I were scheduled to hop on Metro North to the city that morning and start putting things in motion for the next day’s show.

I emailed everyone who was performing with us and told them about my condition. “I’m throwing all the cold meds at it and hoping for the best,” I wrote, resigned to having to whisper my songs. Mike Albo wrote back, “Don’t worry, show-day adrenaline will take care of that!” I laughed (and sent Mike a laugh emoji in reply).

And then Mike’s prediction came true. Wednesday afternoon, suddenly my head was unclogged. I sounded like me again. I was still deeply mired in impostor sydrome, but at least I could breathe—and sing. About an hour before my cue to start the show, I shifted into the fugue state I mentioned above, and it removed all that self-doubt from my consciousness.

This blessed state of affairs continued through the rest of the evening. When I sang, my voice was a clear as a bell, thank Whoever is In Charge of The Universe. The whole evening went off without a hitch, and the audience seemed to really enjoy it. I can’t begin to describe what a relief—and joy—it all was. I feel so fortunate, and grateful.

Of course, Thursday morning, right on cue, the snot came flooding back into my sinuses, along with some laryngitis. I was sick again all weekend.

I’m almost at the end of it now. (This had better be the fucking end already!) Which makes me even more in awe of what happened: in the absence of prescription steriods, my adrenal glands just manufactured their own. Thank you, adrenal glands!

Fortunately the next show is a little lower-stakes: a Gen-X night at Sid Gold’s Request Room with a few featured performers. Not a variety show like last week’s, which took a lot of work and coordination and rehearsal to produce. (I am doing another of those Friday, August 7th at Joe’s Pub, but at least I have some time between now and then to pull it together!)

Now if I can only find a way to not freak out and doubt myself each time, so I don’t require a spike in adrenalyn to get me through, mentally and physically…

In other news…

Last week and I were featured in The New York Times Style section, in an article by Kasia Pilat.

Where to find my other work:

• Oldster Magazine

• Memoir Land

• My books

• The audio version of my memoir.

• My website.

I have never seen Kramer vs. Kramer. It came out in 1979, three years after my parents split up, and they both thought it would be too painful for my sister and me, so they steered us away from it even though every kid we knew had seen it.

I can probably handle it now, if by “handle it” you mean cry my eyes out through the whole thing. That’s what I did yesterday when I watched Is This Thing On? a romantic comedy about a couple with kids who are splitting up, starring Will Arnett and Laura Dern. I loved the movie by the way. Still, I bawled and bawled.

This is my reaction to pretty much any art having to do with divorcing parents. Also to news that parents I know in real life are ending their marriages.

For example, a few years ago, on a long car ride with a possibly divorcing friend (she later changed her mind, whew), she noticed I was getting emotional as she laid out her plan for leaving. She paused and asked, “Is this triggering for you because of your divorce?”

It bears mentioning that I am a once-divorced person who gets upset about other people’s divorces. I was married the first time from 23 to 26, and thank goodness I got out. We didn’t have kids, so I guess that puts our breakup in a different category. I’ll add that kids or no kids, intellectually I am 100% pro divorce. It’s a necessary evil, allowing people to leave untenable marriages and start their lives over. What’s more, as became glaringly evident during and after the pandemic, “the traditional family,” especially with heterosexual parents, has historically been an unfair arrangement for women.

Back to that car ride. I was feeling triggered, but it had to do with the other divorce, the first one, not the one I went through in my late 20s. As the world’s oldest “divorce kid” (that’s what we called my scruffy kind when I was growing up in the south shore Long Island suburbs of the 70s), I carry around a deep 50-year-old wound that seems impervious to treatment. Lord knows I’ve had enough therapy, starting when I was a teen, ending a few years ago when my last therapist closed her practice.

I’ve been hard on myself about this apparent inability to heal or in any way move past what happened to my family in 1976. I’ve only realized lately that it feels like a death, the death of my family of origin. (Something something “grief has no time limit”…)

The night my parents told us they were separating, I petitioned them to think again. Do you want me to be from a broken home?! I cried. Your family of origin is your first psychic home, and when its torn asunder it fractures your basic foundation. Even when the split is for the best—even when parents do their best to minimize the rancor, and otherwise mitigate the fallout—divorce is hard on kids.

The ill effects been well documented with research, like in Judith S. Wallerstein’s The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study, published in 2000. I know that at least one subsequent study is said to have debunked that one, but I call bullshit on that. I mean, I am a walking, talking specimen, and I know so many others just like me. (And by now there’s probably a backlash-to-the-backlash, as often happens with these kinds of reports.)

Maybe it was harder on my generation. When Gen X’s parents divorced, it was the beginning of a new trend—a boom. It took everyone by surprise, and no one knew what the hell they were doing. There were also fewer possibilities then in terms of what a family could look like. Now there are so many other models, and that’s good.

These days divorce is so much more common and there’s much greater awareness about how to make it less traumatic for kids. I really like the idea of “nesting,” in which the divorcing parents take turns living with the kids in the family’s home, as opposed to the kids being shuttled back and forth two or three times a week like I was. In my case, my two residences were an hour apart, in different counties, with two entirely separate casts of main and surrounding characters. That was really jarring for me, emotionally, socially, and even academically, since I often wasn’t sure which residence my text books and notebooks and homework were in.

***

This all began happening when I was 10 and now I’m 60. I can understand if you might feel inclined to tell me to get over it already. It’s old news! I can no longer even imagine my parents together. They’re friendly, which is nice. But when I look back, I don’t recall them ever seeming like a couple.

Still, it makes sense to me that this early, foundational trauma has such a lasting impact. It’s part of who I am, and I suppose it always will be.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, in the 90s I worked on a memoir called Adventures in Divorce. I never got past the proposal phase, and I’m glad I didn’t publish the intended version. It was meant to be what today is called “memoir plus,” a mix of first-person writing and researched reporting.

I’ll confess here that I don’t much like “memoir plus.” I don’t enjoy reading it—I get so much more out of delving into just one person’s well-told story without all the academic posturing and other people’s anecdotes to justify it. And I’m definitely not going to write it. (One editor had suggested I take And You May Find Yourself… in that direction, and I’m glad I didn’t.)

I’ve started very preliminarily sketching out a different version of that book, another memoir-in-essays, and while it will probably be a long while before I want to take that on in a big way, it feels good to start making new sense of it all. Maybe that’s a kind of healing. And maybe it’s time to finally give Kramer vs. Kramer a watch.

In other news…

Tickets are almost sold out for the Joe’s Pub event. You can also attend virtually, as it’s happening or for up to a week afterward, for $10.

Where to find my other work:

• Oldster Magazine

• Memoir Land

• My books

• The audio version of my memoir.

• My website.

Do not even talk to me until you’ve harassed your senators to vote against funding this criminal, lethal horror. When people in Minneapolis are putting their bodies on the line—being illegally detained, brutalized, and murdered—making calls and writing emails is the literal least we can do. Call (202) 224-3121 and give ‘em hell. Or get the 5 Calls app, which makes it easy and provides simple scripts to read.

—

Hi. How are you? Me? Not so good. I’m guessing it’s the same for you. I won’t rehash the horror, or my rage and sorrow. You know.

But there’s an aspect to this that’s occurred to me in the past few days that I want to touch on. The cognitive dissonance between the state sanctioned terror and the everyday things we do to get through—and dare I say enjoy—our lives is rapidly becoming more pronounced, growing more and more impossible to ignore. This is uncomfortably familiar. It reminds me of a similar situation from nearly six years ago.

I’m talking specifically about early March, 2020, before lockdown, when we had no idea how much our lives were about to be disrupted. So many of us assumed the encroaching Covid virus would cause only a brief inconvenience. It would affect us for a few weeks, we thought, maybe a month or two at the most. After that, we believed, everything would go back to “normal.”

We didn’t know that we were about to be subjected to a major paradigm shift that would upend so many of the fixtures of our lives. It would touch every aspect of existence.

Mismanagement of the Covid response, including government lies about prevention and treatment, would mean we’d lose more friends and family than if things had been handled well. In my extended family, there were three deaths.

Many of us, Brian and I included, would lose our brick-and-mortar businesses—Kingston Writers’ Studio for me, and Tech Smiths for Brian, making it necessary for him to file for bankruptcy, a painful experience for both of us and our household finances. So many of our favorite establishments wouldn’t survive, either.

Needing to isolate in our homes would weaken our bonds with the people in our lives, interrupting the rhythms of even our closest friendships—something I know I still haven’t recovered from, socially.

Not to mention how much it screwed up everyone’s kids, emotionally, socially, and educationally. And how much it damaged their parents’ marriages and partnerships. (I speak about this not from personal experience, but as a witness.)

***

On Sunday, March 8th, 2020, Brian and I took ourselves out to lunch at a local Mexican restaurant. Brian mused aloud, “Can you imagine if this is the last time we get to eat out for a long time?” I have no idea what “a long time” meant for him in that moment, but it probably wasn’t the year-or-more it would turn out to be before we’d set foot, trepidatiously, into another indoor dining establishment.

In those early pandemic days, my mom was stuck all by herself in Florida, unable to get back to New York so she could be nearer to my sister and me. She was a snowbird then, but has since sold her Florida condo. Before selling the place in December, 2021, most years she’d return to her primary home on Long Island in April or May. But in 2020, it didn’t seem safe for her to fly until late July. That’s when I began FaceTiming with her twice a day, morning and night.

To calm her nerves, she’d started turning to adult coloring books. I mailed her one full of swear words, and she made the piece in the photo above inspired by you-know-who.

And here we are again. I keep flashing back to that lunch at the Mexican restaurant. I have the nagging feeling that we’re about to be stripped of so many simple normalcies of our day-to-day lives, this time by way of martial law, or a civil war, or just more of the kind of terror we’ve endured these past few weeks.

***

In the mean time, I’m trying to keep my publications, and , about what they’re meant to be about—getting older at every phase of life, and writing and reading personal narratives. But each week, particularly in my Oldster Letters from the Editor, it becomes progressively more difficult to steer clear of what we’re living through—what’s being imposed on us by a cruel, racist, misogynist narcissist and attention whore, who needed to go away a long time ago.

For March 4th I’ve planned what is meant to be a joyous celebration of love and the privilege of getting older at Joe’s Pub—another evening of story and song like the one I put on in Kingston October 1st. I had finally gotten to the place where I felt permitted to do this, and completely excited and gung-ho. Then that asshole sent his goons out with permission to assassinate peaceful protesters.

I hope I still get to do it, and more events after that. But it’s getting harder and harder to keep the faith, to believe it’s necessary and possible to make art, to do things we enjoy just because we enjoy them.

I feel intensely resentful toward that monster—a willful chaos agent intent on wrecking the entire world at warp speed. Ditto everyone who helped bring about this awful state of affairs, and the attendant paradigm shift that is likely coming as a result of it.

P.S. Tickets are almost sold out for the Joe’s Pub event. I’m working on putting together a ticketed streaming option. Stay tuned…

Where to find my other work:

• Oldster Magazine

• Memoir Land

• My books

• The audio version of my memoir.

• My website.

Big news: I’ve planned and scheduled the next Variety Hour, this one at Joe’s Pub on March 4th at 7pm. It’s got an amazing lineup: comedian and storyteller Ophira Eisenberg; author and performance artist Mike Albo; author and humorist Joyce Wadler; singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and music professor Ross Rice; my husband, singer-songwriter and storyteller Brian Macaluso; and me.

I mean, obviously yay. But once again I find myself riding a pendulum back and forth between out-of-my-mind-excitement and crippling self-doubt. Just like before, I’m being led in this direction by my inner 10-year-old, a real ham who loves to put on (and take part in) a cabaret. But as soon as I get deep into planning out the evening and let my mind wander, envisioning just how great it might be, I get arrested by the bruised teen who lives inside me, the kid who’s never fully recovered from being bullied and called “conceited” and “stuck up” for thinking she had any right to perform onstage—for believing in herself and whatever talents she might have possessed.

In truth, I reside on this pendulum full-time. I swing on it constantly, every time I dare to publish a piece of my own writing—whether in my own publications or elsewhere—and even when I share my work and that of my contributors on social media, including Substack Notes. Every single time, reverberating in my brain is a chorus of Mean Girls—some real, some imagined, all deeply internalized—asking, Who the hell do you think you are?

It’s an old story, and also possibly an irreversible part of my creative process, this need to ruin things for myself before I feel permitted to enjoy them. I preliminarily shoot myself down in all the ways I have been by others in the past—not only as a musical theater kid, but now and then as an adult writer. It’s happened publicly, privately and behind my back, in a competitive field swarming with back-biters. Beating them to the punch is a weird form of self-protection, but it’s what I know.

In between moments of self-doubt and self-torture, I get these surges of chutzpah, and I ride them as far as they’ll take me. Thank goodness for those, because otherwise I’d be forever standing in my own way. I could use more of those surges, and recently I’ve found a way to spark them: cribbing courage from younger writers.

There are a few millennial and Gen Z writers I follow, because I like their work, but also their moxie. They haven’t been infected by the toxic Gen X inclination to self-sabotage for cred, and it’s awesome. Oh, how weary I’ve grown of my own generation’s false modesty—the “ironic” self-deprecation designed to cancel out our having dared to achieve anything, or even take up space. (I talked a bit about this annoyance with when I interviewed her for about her NYTimes/T Magazine article, “Is Gen X Actually the Greatest Generation?”)

In between moments of self-torture, I get these surges of chutzpah, and I ride them as far as they’ll take me. Thank goodness for those, because otherwise I’d be forever standing in my own way. I could use more of those surges, and recently I’ve found a way to spark them: cribbing courage from younger writers.

I’m not going to tell you who those younger writers are, except to say they’re all women, because I don’t want them to know I’m paying attention to them, don’t want to make them feel self-conscious. But every day I observe them on Substack Notes and elsewhere, just coming out swinging with full self-confidence and unabashed pride in their work—full-stop, no “lol” or apology or self-deprecating comment tacked on at the end to assure you they aren’t “full of themselves”—or, to return to Island Park/West Hempstead ‘80s teen parlance, “conceited” or “stuck up.”

They just put themselves out there, not only pointing us to their work, but informing us that, in their (not so humble) opinion, it’s quite good. What a refreshing, inspiring thing to behold!

After witnessing one of those women first post “[NAME OF NEWSLETTER] rocks!” about her very successful publication, and then “[NAME OF NEWSLETTER]’s readers are the best!” I felt emboldened to publish some borderline boastful Notes of my own:

Of course, I felt like I needed to duck after publishing each of those. But both notes got a lot of likes and engagement. So I published more Notes in a similar vein. I brought more fake-it-till-you-make-it confidence to social media posts about my work and that of my contributors.

What I’ve begun learning through this experiment is that when I put myself out there confidently—without also reflexively turning against myself with “irony” (← a word my generation has chronically misused)—people have a positive response. Those younger writers were onto something! People seem to like me better when I show up with confidence, as if I deserve to be in the room. As if I’m a person who has been doing these things—writing, editing, performing—for decades, often rather successfully.

That’s what happened the night of October 1st, when I put on the first Oldster Variety Hour at Unicorn in Kingston. At a certain point that day, adrenaline or who knows what completely overrode my self-doubt and anxiety, and I got up on that stage like I owned the place. I did my thing—sang my songs, told my stories, introduced my wonderful cast, asked each of them, “How old are you, and what do you like about being your age?”—and the audience ate it up. Many people came up to me afterward to tell me they loved it, encouraging me to do more performances like it.

For a good while I soared, emotionally, on the success of that evening. I thought to myself, Why haven’t I done things like this sooner? Why have I been waiting for some kind of external permission that was never going to come? When can I do this again—I need to do more of this before this world ends, or I get too old, or die.

Then I started putting together this next event, and I found myself right back on that old reliable pendulum.

***

When I reached out to the woman who curates events at Joe’s Pub, I was sure she’d say no, if she even bothered to get back to me. But she did get back to me, and when she did, she asked if I had video from the Kingston event. Reluctantly I sent her the janky footage I captured with my iPhone, propped up on a tripod off to the side that night. I was reminded of how mad I’ve been at myself for not hiring a photographer and videographer. And I was certain my blurry video with bad sound would put an end to the conversation with the Joe’s Pub booker.

But then I got another email. She told me she though the Kingston show was just delightful, and encouragingly invited me to stage this next event there. And so I am.

Here’s hoping that in the two months between now and March 4th, more often than not my inner 10-year-old will override the self-doubter with PTSD. The world is already hard enough with out my adding to it. And, for crying out loud, it’s a show about love—no room for that kind of self-hatred.

It would be really nice to enjoy the run-up to what I know in my bones will be a fun and memorable evening. I hope some of you will come…

Get Tickets

Where to find my other work:

• Oldster Magazine

• Memoir Land

• My books

• The audio version of my memoir.

• My website.

This week my next door neighbor put her mixed-use property on the market. It’s a house with a bodega attached—a little shop that most patrons go to for beer, cigarettes, snacks, the ATM, and lottery tickets—a million dollars’ worth gross, annually according to the listing.

I’m ashamed to admit that since buying our house in 2018, I’ve contributed my fair share to that sum. Typically I’ll spend $5 on three tickets each time: one Lotto, one Powerball, and one MegaMillions. If it’s a big pot, I’ll spend a bit more—up to $10.

Even though I know my chances are infinitesimal—I’ve read one in 300-million—I get a little spring in my step, a little dopamine boost, each time I hand over the cash and receive my three squares of thermal paper. Although maybe it’s not perfectly irrational to think I could win, given that the first time Brian and I bought a Lotto ticket together, in 2003, we won $151. We put it toward a date at The River Cafe.

I’m ashamed to admit that since buying our house in 2018, I’ve contributed my fair share to the $1 million in gross lottery ticket sales next door. Typically I’ll spend $5 on three tickets each time: one Lotto, one Powerball, and one MegaMillions. If it’s a big pot, I’ll spend a bit more—up to $10.

Still, despite that one exciting time, after each drawing I’m overcome with a bad feeling, even before I check to see if I’ve lost or won. I realize then that I’ve likely done the equivalent of throwing $5 down the toilet, and it bums me out.

Which is probably why I have 21 unchecked tickets, purchased between 2022 and last month, clipped together and affixed to my fridge with a magnet. (I’ve figured if the shop next door sold some big winning ticket and no one had turned it in, I’d hear about it, and then go check my numbers.)

Those 21 tickets represent just a fraction of the ones I’ve purchased. More often than not, I buck up and check the numbers, either walking next door and having my neighbor scan them, or looking them up on the New York State Lottery website. But obviously I dread the second part of the ritual. Otherwise I wouldn’t have that growing stack nestled in between old photos, the garbage pickup schedule, our Covid vaccination cards (remember those?) and many outdated holiday greetings from family and friends.

It’s a silly routine I should quit. Except now I really want a winning lottery ticket—so that I can buy the place next door. The place where I buy the lottery tickets. Wouldn’t that make a great story?

I get a little spring in my step, a little dopamine boost, each time I hand over the cash and receive my three squares of thermal paper. But after each drawing I’m overcome with a bad feeling, even before I check to see if I’ve lost or won. Which is probably why I have 21 unchecked tickets, purchased between 2022 and last month, clipped together and affixed to my fridge with a magnet.

Ever since my neighbor started talking, a few months ago, about possibly selling the place, I’ve been fantasizing about what I’d do with it. It’s partly because I don’t want some bad, noisy establishment to come in and negatively affect my quality of life or my property value—I mean, who would be a better neighbor for me than me?—but more because I think my idea would be an awesome addition to Kingston (and of course my life):

Downstairs I’d re-open Kingston Writers’ Studio, but this time with a cafe as part of it—I even have a name for the cafe part: “Clarisse’s,” after my late grandmother, who spent time in Kingston as a little girl.

Upstairs, I’d put a writing residency, where I’d welcome people for a couple of weeks or months at a time.

For the uninitiated, Kingston Writers’ Studio was a co-working space for writers that I operated in Kingston from January of 2017 until March of 2020. I’d started it in The Opera House building in uptown, then moved it to The Fuller Building in midtown. (I was at The Fuller Building yesterday for their holiday market, and it broke my heart, being in there.)

I created it mostly for me, so that I’d have a place to commune with other writers, and be less lonely in my upstate work life. Financially it was a losing proposition. I had no idea how to run that kind of a business, and I never charged enough. Still, I loved it, and I was proud of it, and I was so sad when the pandemic forced me to shutter it.

Now rents are two and three times what they were when I closed, so reopening in an existing office building is out of the question. (I’d join one of the three co-working spaces in Kingston if they weren’t so expensive, or sparsely attended, according to friends who have been.)

I think with a windfall, I could make something fun and affordable that people would want to come to. Maybe this time it wouldn’t be just for writers.

Ever since my neighbor started talking, a few months ago, about possibly selling the place, I’ve been fantasizing about what I’d do with it, partly because I don’t want some bad, noisy establishment to come in and negatively affect my quality of life or my property value—I mean, who would be a better neighbor for me than me?—but more because I think my idea would be an awesome addition to Kingston (and of course my life): I want to reopen Kingston Writers’ Studio, this time with a cafe as part of it.

A friend suggested I try to get investors, or a collective of partners for the project. But I think I’d only actually make my idea happen if I suddenly came into $1.5 million or more. Come to think of it, maybe more like $2 million.

By the way, I’ve been thinking about what I’d do with a lump sum like that since fifth grade, when there was a school-wide essay writing contest on the subject of “If I had a million dollars...” A bunch of teachers, including mine, took their classes to see local a production of The Me Nobody Knows, a musical about poor kids in New York City in the 70s. It included this song, which inspired the contest’s theme:

I won that essay writing contest. Maybe I can get lucky again.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going next door to buy some more tickets. Now that I have a goal I’ll be sure to check them, and all the old ones.

Wish me luck. Or, if you’re in the market, and you have a great idea for an establishment of some kind—one that wouldn’t be too noisy or attract ne’er do wells—come and be my neighbor.

Where to find my other work:

• Oldster Magazine

• Memoir Land

• My books

• The audio version of my memoir.

• My website.

I guess the joke’s on me for beginning to write a post last Sunday about how nice it is to attend crowded events again—to be among people, after all those years of Covid isolation.

Cut to scene of me abandoning the post because my eyes and nose burned. Then cut to scene of me writing you a different post, right now, from my Covid bed.

***

We’d had an especially fun weekend, beginning with the 8th birthday party for our wonderful local indie bookstore/bar, Rough Draft, Friday night, followed by drinks with friends at The Kinsley, where we ran into even more friends.

Saturday afternoon I stopped by the opening of Julie Hedrick’s etherial show, “Temporal Motion,” at One Mile Gallery, where her husband Peter Wetzler’s dreamy musical compositions served as a perfect compliment to her paintings. I enjoyed her work, and connecting with people I hadn’t seen in some time.

That night we attended ’s really fun, uplifting Leonard Cohen tribute/sing-along at The Colony in Woodstock, where we got to catch up with many friends and acquaintances. (And I got to enjoy gluten-free fish and chips.)

It was sunny and warm enough on Sunday that I could mow the lawn for the last time this year in a long-sleeve shirt and a vest while Brian raked leaves.

All felt right in the world, so I started that cheerful post.

***

We assumed it was the cut grass and dried leaves that had made our eyes and noses burn Sunday evening. Allergies. Then Tuesday night Brian spiked a fever and Wednesday tested positive for Covid. Thursday I started feeling shitty and feverish and tested positive, too.

We have no idea how high our fevers were, though, because all three digital thermometers in the house gave different, very low readings. Like 97.something and 96.something. That made no sense.

Eager to know the real numbers, I ordered a glass-and-mercury thermometer from The Evil Empire which arrived in like under 12 hours. But in my feverishness and haste, I didn’t realized I was ordering one that read temperatures in celsius. When I converted my 41.5 reading it told me I had a fever of 106.7, which obviously can’t be right.

***

We both wore masks when a new sleep-sofa for my office was delivered Thursday, so as not to get the delivery guys sick. Before they arrived, we put the couch/futon we were replacing out on our lawn to give it away. We’d placed the legs and hardware in a clear plastic bag, and Scotch Taped an index card to it that read “FREE.”

I posted about it on the Kingston FreeCycle board on Facebook, and on Instagram, and figured it would be less than 24 hours before someone snagged it. Any time I’ve put even a chipped mug out there, it’s disappeared within hours. The couch/futon isn’t the best, but it’s perfectly fine. We were just slightly upgrading our sleep accommodations before Macaluso Thanksgiving, planned for next Saturday, when my mom and several of Brian’s family members are (were?) meant to stay over.

Friday morning, I peeked outside out to discover the couch-futon was still there but the bag with the legs and hardware had been taken. Why would someone take the legs and hardware but not the couch/futon? How stupid. How infuriating. Now we’ll have to borrow or rent a truck to take the fucking thing to the dump. (It’s sitting on our covered porch now if anyone wants to use it as just a futon.)

This morning my 85-year-old mom on Long Island tested positive for Covid, too, so she won’t be joining us in Kingston next weekend. Looks like we didn’t need the extra accommodations (and expense of a new sleep-sofa). Who knows if we’ll even be well enough to host Macaluso Thanksgiving next Saturday. Wheeeee…

***

But wait. There’s more. This morning I awoke to a text from Chase that for the second time this year, there was fraudulent activity on my debit card, which is now canceled. Some yutz treated him- or herself to $60 worth of whatever it is you get at Dave & Buster’s, on my dime. Where’s the supreme time suck that is multi-factor authentication when you need it?

That made it hard to do the most idiotic and embarrassing thing I’ve done in a while: pay for Part 2 of you-know-what. Listen, I’m home with Covid, feeling like shit, not sure whether I’ll be able to celebrate Thanksgiving next week. I’m worried about my mom, who lives alone, and I’m too sick to go down to Long Beach take care of her. I suppose I could have waited for someone to screenshot Part 2, but I am in no condition right now to pass a marshmallow tests.

Because of the debit card breach, I had to put the subscription on our joint credit card. I gave Brian one of the gift-subscriptions that came with mine so he wouldn’t be mad.

I hate how riveted I’ve been to this entire story. It is the ultimate train wreck, but my attachment to it isn’t only a function of shameful schadenfreude, although that is a part of it. It’s also just such a shame in terms of what it says about the state of journalism and journalists right now, and I genuinely think that’s something we all need to be aware of.

For what it’s worth, I have compassion for the side of the “Hitchcock blonde” that’s a sex and love addict. I have nothing but harsh judgment for the side of her that has lied (and lied and lied, outright, and by omission) and conspired with a duplicitous politician who is surely out to hurt us. That she failed upward anyway, in a dying field I’ve largely had to walk away from, makes it even worse. (Although, maybe she’ll soon face consequences?)

***

More still: Today our beloved local slice shop, Ollies (which sold gluten-free slices I hated, but at least I could get something), shutters—as did its sister business, Fletcher & Lu, the great but too high-priced gourmet shop next door, a few weeks ago.

That’s two out of three storefronts that two years ago replaced Tony’s, a long-standing, not-fancy pizzeria. (In 2023 my friend wrote a great essay about losing Tony’s along with other favorite, low-key haunts in Kingston.) So far the third of those businesses, the high-ticket restaurant Eliza, is still standing, but I have my doubts.

It’s another consequence of the over-hyping of Kingston that happened during the pandemic, the biggest consequence being an affordable housing shortage. Speculators with deep pockets (and cash) drove up the prices of both residential and commercial real estate, and now the proprietors of the high-end stores and restaurants that came to town (which tended to be open only for “weekender hours”) are discovering we just don’t have the clientele for them. Also, that rich weekenders don’t want to spend their time upstate shopping and dining at the kinds of places they frequent when they’re back in Manhattan and Brooklyn. They want quiet days and nights in their second homes.

I miss 2019, when everything around here seemed to have peaked in a more organic way. When we’d moved up in 2005, there were so few places to eat and shop, and most of those were open only a few days a week, for short hours.

Over the years, though, that all improved. By the end of 2019/early 2020, Kingston and the towns around it were bustling. I could afford to frequent most of the restaurants, cafes, and nightclubs, at least once or twice a week, and the shops carried merchandise I wanted and could largely afford. There were places to go seven days a week.

The pandemic killed almost all of that, and put us back to where we were in 2005, except now I can’t afford to frequent so many of the new places with sparse hours—not other than on rare special occasions. There are a few new stores at which I can’t afford a single item, and I wonder how long it will be before they shutter their doors, too.

And what, if anything, will replace them? We have so many empty storefronts. Sometimes they’ll be filled (briefly) by increasingly ubiquitous weed shops, or overpriced vintage stores, or worse, realty offices. It’s never promising when the number one thing for sale in a town is the town.

***

Sorry for the cranky post. I feel like crap. I really wish the optimistic one I’d started last Sunday with stars in my eyes had panned out instead.

Who should I speak to about sending this week back for a refund? Maybe I can pack it up with the celsius thermometer and save on postage.

Where to find my other work:

• Oldster Magazine

• Memoir Land

• My books

• The audio version of my memoir.

• My website.

In these horrid times are you, like me, enduring all sorts of psychic and corporeal pain? Have you similarly lost faith in most or all the various (often contradictory) remedies on offer? (Does your expensive yet useless American health insurance simply not cover most them?)

Perhaps you might benefit from my patented approach, AcrossTheBoardAvoidance™. Here’s how I’m using it to address my assorted sources of misery.

Overheard in Kingston, NY: “MY ENTIRE SKELETON HURTS”

Okay, it was me—I’m the one who said it. Says it. At least twice a day poor Brian has to listen to me make that dramatic declaration. But it’s true. I have arthritis throughout my body. It’s worst in my hips, knees, neck, and shoulders.

There was a significant period during which Brian would make thoughtful suggestions like, “What if you tried hanging down upside-down on an inversion table?” (I have no idea where he thinks I might locate an inversion table.) Now he just smiles lovingly, resignedly, until I’m done kvetching and move onto another topic, like my overarching malaise, a common effect of living in These Times.

My orthopedist wants me to try Platelet Rich Plasma injections for my largest pain center, my bum hip. But those are considered by the medical establishment to be experimental, and therefore the $1200-$1500 a pop is uncovered by insurance. When I polled friends (and “friends”) about this treatment on Facebook, half of those who tried it raved, the other half said it was a painful (big needle, no anesthesia—see: ineligible for insurance) waste of money and time.

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He also sent me for physical therapy, which made things worse. Oh, how many people I’ve had to listen to insisting I need to give PT another try! Oh, how much energy it takes for me to explain that since then, we’ve learned I have gluteal tendinopathy—a degenerative fraying of the hip tendon, for which PT is apparently contraindicated.

What is advised? Because gluteal tendinopathy appears to be menopause-related, hormone therapy is recommended. Except…not for me. Nope, too much breast cancer (and other reproductive cancers) in my family.

Two years ago I received an epidural injection of cortisone in my sacroiliac joint, which gave me nine blessed months of partial relief from my pain. Then my mom fell and when I picked her up, I threw out my back and hip, causing new spinal damage, and undoing all that relief.

Now Fidelis, my insurance company, has decided to belatedly deny coverage for the shot, and my orthopedist and I are both having to fight them. If we fail, that’s $10K I don’t have. So I guess I’m not going to be winning another one of those magical steroid injections in the American health insurance sweepstakes.

And I guess it should be no surprise that in 2026 the Optum medical network, which includes most of my doctors, will no longer be accepting Fidelis insurance (the cheap—er, “cheap”—option on the New York State Marketplace). Now I have to find a new provider. For a lot more money. I hope they cover at least a few basic medical necessities!

In the meantime, I’m basically striving, hour-to-hour, to ignore my body-wide agony, doing little more than occasionally popping a Meloxicam, an anti-inflammatory drug that is less hard on the stomach than Advil, which I can’t tolerate.

It’s Dark Out There…and In Here 🧠

Seasonal-affective depression showed up right on time this year, the day we turned the clocks back. Actually, I’d felt it creeping in for a week or two before. I’m buckling up for a solid five months of this, until we switch back to Daylight Savings Time. (Although I did get quite an emotional boost from today’s election results.)

I go through the sunnier half of each year with a baseline level of depression I’ve learned to tolerate. The darker half of the year is always a bigger emotional challenge. Someone gave me a special lamp for dealing with Seasonal Affective Disorder. I’ve tried it to negligible effect. Maybe I should give it more time, but that would cut into my YouTube-karaoke-at-my-desk time, which actually seems to help.

My depression was particularly acute a few winters ago, when my freaking journal was subpoenaed in a #metoo-related case (like the bridge-and-tunnel New York literary world Zelig I occasionally show up as, I’m the reason a certain person had to settle his defamation case)—and, simultaneously, a forensic accountant from the United States Government was scrutinizing every transaction recorded in my checking account.

That year I tried to find a new therapist. I’ve been something of a psychotherapeutic orphan since my last one closed her practice. In my search, I found it wild how many sketchy modalities shrinks were now tacking on to their credentials. I gave a therapist who uses Somatic Experiencing a try, and it did not go well.

It made me nostalgic for regular-degular talk therapy like you’d get in the 90s and aughts. For those unfamiliar with such halcyon days, for a $25 copay per session, courtesy of your $200/month Oxford plan, someone would listen to you spin out in the same ways, week after week, and then point out that you were spinning out in the same ways, week after week, and you’d feel slightly better and more self-aware for the remaining six days until your next appointment.

Nobody was interrupting your ugly cry to say shit like, “Oh, no, we don’t talk about our feelings anymore. Now, we do this instead: tap your shoulders with your fingertips. Feel Mother Earth underneath you. Imagine that she is reaching up and supporting you. Can you feel her? You’re supported!” All this can be yours for $200 per 50-minute session.

That experience put a serious dent in my faith in the talking cure. Still, recently I thought I might try to find a therapist. I was particularly interested in someone who treats patients through the lens of neurodivergence. As with just about all my various conditions, I’ve done virtually nothing to delve into the level one autism I was diagnosed with last year. I mean, I don’t really feel like doing anything about it? Maybe I never will? It’s kind of been satisfying enough just to have that suspicion about myself confirmed. But I wondered whether trying therapy from that angle might help me in some new and different way—while also helping me feel like less of a lazy bum for not having delved into my diagnosis.

Scrolling Psychology Today’s listings, I learned most of the therapists in my area who do that work treat only neurodivergent children. I reached out to the sole practitioner who seems to work with adults, but it took her six weeks to reply, and when she did, she informed me she’s not taking new patients. She referred me to someone who is not trained to address neurodivergence, who I know tangentially, socially (a hazard of seeking out shrinks in a city with a population of just 24K).

In recent weeks my faith in the whole psychology enterprise has been further shaken, thanks to some articles blowing the lids off multiple kinds of trauma therapies. But the backlash to one of those articles, calling it a sensationalized hit piece, has shattered my already tenuous faith in legacy magazine journalism.

Hey, in these dystopian times, what’s one less thing to believe in? And one more pressing problem to do not one fucking thing about?

Can Somebody Please Pass the Workahol?

It has been suggested by some that I might have descended into the depths of workaholism, juggling, as I do, the editing, publishing, and publicizing of two magazines, posting eight to ten times a week, while also trying to extend each magazine’s reach beyond this platform with things like live events, a book proposal, and a possible podcast.

Maybe this is the workahol talking, but hear me out: You need work to live. Also, I’ve got all my eggs in this digital magazine basket, and I need to keep this top spinning for as long as I can because I have absolutely no idea what I’ll do next if this whole gambit gets enshittified.

Also? Work makes me feel good—and accomplished, and proud, goddammit. It distracts me from the autocratic hell we’re living through. So what if I spend most of my days strung out on the dopamine derived from next-right-thing-ing it from dawn to dusk? Whatever gets you through the (dark) night (of the soul), amirite?

People also like what I do. Which unfortunately brings up my addiction to people-pleasing, about which I’m doing, you guessed it, nothing.

“And I said, ‘Nothing; I’m feeling nothing’”

In conclusion, what am I doing about my pervasive arthritis, fragile emotional state, Level 1 autism, and workaholism? Nada. Zilch. Zip.

How are you all dealing with your assorted kinds of pain? Have you considered doing not one fucking thing? I’m not sure I can recommend it, but I’m also not sure I can recommend anything else.

Where to find my other work:

• My books

• The audio version of my memoir.

• My website.

Adding to my anxiety about last week’s variety show was that I’d accidentally scheduled it for Kol Nidre, the beginning of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year.

I worried fellow Jews would give me shit (a few did), but worse, I feared that my 90-year-old dad, a much beloved cantor, would assume that I, his fucked up “rebel” daughter, had chosen that date deliberately. My dad and I are getting along well these days after years of not, and at this late date, I do not want to jeopardize that.

No, it was a genuine mistake. For some time I’d been working hard to find the right venue, the right lineup, the right mix of stories and songs, so when the (also Jewish) owner of Unicorn Bar suggested I share the night of 10/1 with (also Jewish) piano karaoke master Paul Leschen’s EPIPHONIC event, already on the calendar, it felt as if the stars were aligning and all was right in the world. I said yes, and got to work booking performers (one of whom is also Jewish, bringing the tally of “bad” Jews involved in the event to 4). A week later, I inadvertently stumbled across the fact of my unfortunate timing.

***

At one time in my life, the dates of Jewish holidays featured prominently on my radar. I always had a bead on Yom Kippur in particular, because it often falls close to, or right on my birthday, as it did this year. As birthday bummers go for a kid, having yours coincide with the day of atonement—a day on which you ruminate on how badly you’ve behaved, and aren’t even allowed to eat—is way up there.

(Weirdly, on my 3rd birthday, which also fell on Yom Kippur, my parents explained the holiday to me, then inexplicably sent me outside with a box of cookies before synagogue, and wouldn’t let me back in no matter how loudly I banged on the front door. Ah, parenting in the 1970s. No wonder Gen X is so deeply fucked up. A few years ago I asked my mom whether I’d remembered that correctly and she explained, “Oh, yes, we were conceiving your sister,” who was born exactly nine months later. There had been fertility issues, and my mom’s temperature spiked that morning, indicating ovulation, etc., etc.)

In recent years, for a variety of reasons and for my sanity, I’ve distanced myself from religious observance. It’s more complicated than I want to go into here, but at a fundamental level, there are two kinds of clergy kids: the ones who fully embrace the religion, and maybe even become clergy themselves, like the son of my dad’s long-time pulpit partner; and the ones who run away from it and get tattoos.

Guess which one I am?

Once I realized the Oldster event coincided with Kol Nidre, I began perseverating: Should I reschedule, which would have been difficult on a number of fronts? Or should I keep it, and for once in my life do something on that holiday that didn’t feel oppressive to me—like sitting miserably through droning services, or sulking at home, feeling bored and guilty for taking care of myself by sitting the holiday out?

Back and forth I went, obsessively, between my two options, like the ridiculous Libra that I am. Every time I leaned more in the direction of keeping the event, my good feelings about it were halted by the vision of having to explain the whole thing to my dad.

As we shifted into September, I realized I no longer had time to fuck around. I had to choose which way to go…and I chose keeping the event. I steeled myself for delivering the news to my father over FaceTime. I anticipated a Jewish guilt trip of the highest order.

***

As soon as he materialized from across the country in pixels on my iPad, I blurted out my confession. I talked fast, my heart racing. Once the words were out my mouth, my father surprised me.

“Don’t worry about it, honey,” he said, not missing a beat after my nervous diatribe. “I understand. Listen, the world is a horrible mess, so this kind of thing really doesn’t matter right now. What matters is that you are a good person, and you are. You embody all the values Judaism preaches, and so don’t even think twice. Just have a great time.”

Say what? Come again?

I was stunned. The person I’d been arguing with about religion since I was 13 was, shockingly, giving me his blessing for doing my own thing—a thing I desperately needed to do; a thing I knew would make me and everyone in attendance feel good for 90 minutes in this otherwise terrible world. And on the holiest of holy days.

After we said goodbye, I cried—tears of sorrow for all the difficulty between us over so many years, but also of relief and joy. It was similar to his surprisingly positive reaction to my memoir. What a humbling and hopeful thing to realize you can’t always predict people’s responses, even when you’re so certain you can.

***

I’m happy to report the evening was a big success. It was everything I’d dreamed it could be, and more. It was the eve of my 60th birthday, and it was, hands down, the best birthday eve of my life. It carried over into the next day, and the day after that. A week later I’m still feeling all good and glowy.

I’m kicking myself for not thinking to hire someone to shoot photos and video. (The video I took with my iPhone is blurry, the sound weak. I have only a few random photos friends took from the audience.) Next time, I will.

There will definitely be a next time, probably many. First up, New York City, where I’m talking with a few established storytelling shows.

And maybe in April, when my dad turns 91, I’ll put on a show in the Bay Area, where he lives. Maybe he can even be one of the performers. Shhh. Don’t tell him. It’s my turn to deliver a surprise.

P.S. The headline refers to a Yom Kippur prayer called “al chet sh’chatanu,” which translates to “the sin which we have sinned against thee.” It’s a confession of a litany of common sins.

“All of this is part of being seen, and you will never be able to control how people see you.” -

I very much needed Liz Gilbert’s introduction to today’s installment of her newsletter. It’s all about the importance of ignoring the naysayers, the people who don’t *get* you and your work, whose harsh voices might otherwise keep you from showing up and producing what you need to.

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Unfortunately, my own inner voice can be the harshest of all, and tuning out that one is near impossible. It’s part copycat—a voice impersonating those of real, live ninnies—which makes fully drowning out the ninnies even harder.

***

Liz’s post arrived exactly when I needed it. In the run-up to the first-ever in-person event—a variety show I’m putting on this Wednesday, the night before my 60th birthday—I am, rather predictably, doubting myself and my choices, and imagining the worst. I recognize this as a regular, if unfortunate, part of my creative process. Before I can enjoy things it takes chutzpah to give myself, or put out into the world, I apparently have to first ruin them in my mind, making sure I’ve played out every possible worst-case scenario, perhaps in a misguided attempt to ward them off. Or maybe unconsciously I believe preemptive suffering is the price of admission.

I did it to myself before getting my first tattoo. I did it before taking part in a 40-Over-40 photo shoot. I did it to myself for literal decades before publishing my memoir.

Now here I am again, about to take a flying leap, one I dreamed up a long time ago and worked hard to screw up the courage for. And I can’t stop picturing all the ways I might belly-flop, followed by all the naysayers and cool kids of Internet High pointing at me and laughing.

***

Unfortunately, those monsters don’t exist solely in my mind. Recently a man, a media gatekeeper, asked me—with a rather condescending sneer, in front of other people—why I felt “the sudden need to rush into the event space.” Excuse me, sir, but for THREE YEARS I have been talking a good game about creating in-person events for the magazines I work so hard on—for fun, and so that they are more than just “Substacks.” I want Oldster and Memoir Land to be real, three-D media properties with presences beyond the particular platform I happen to publish them on.

If anything, dude, I am way overdue achieving this goal. My 60 birthday felt like a shit-or-get-off-the-pot deal-breaker deadline. So I’m doing this finally, as opposed to suddenly.

A few days later someone who has bullied me and shit-talked me to mutuals in the past let me know, in a public way, that they once again have their eyes on me. They seemed to be saying, “Know your place and keep to it.” Message received. (I’m keeping it vague because I’m afraid of this person and their tremendous influence. Why someone with much greater success and a much bigger platform ever had me in their cross-hairs, or ever apparently felt threatened by me, is beyond my comprehension.) Their words put me on notice and fucked me up in a big way. They validated the negative messages already playing on a loop in my brain. Right before I’m about to not only host an event that’s very dear to me (and kind of tender in a theater-geeky way), but also get onstage and sing two songs before a fairly large audience.

***

Like many writers and other kinds of artists, I have a complicated relationship to being seen. It’s what kept me hiding myself as a ghostwriter for so long instead of writing my own books.

(As I wrote in my Author Questionnaire, I’m glad, in hindsight, that I didn’t get a deal from a big publisher, that my memoir was published by a tiny press, because it afforded me the best of both worlds: I got to publish my book, but in a quieter way—a way that didn’t call more attention to me [and the people who might not prefer to find themselves in my story] than I could handle. It found its right audience, and I’m content with that. I’m as “seen” as I want to be on that front, thank you very much.)

My strongest, most consistent gut instinct is to put myself out there, an instinct I’ve harbored from a young age, and which, honestly, has never really steered me wrong. But that instinct gets overridden for long periods by a secondary instinct—to keep myself small, and fall in line—to know my place and stick to it.

When I posted about the event on social media, I wrote, “I guess I’m really doing this…?” After which my friend, —who’ll be telling wonderful story at Wednesday’s Oldster event—asked me, “Wait, are you feeling shy about this?” Yeah, I am. Shy, and afraid of owning the fairly ballsy imperative to do this.

When I’m self-consciously talking about the event with people I don’t know well, I conveniently blame it on my inner 10-year-old. (I did this in the Oldster post about the event, too.) I’m talking about this kid, who actually had a talent agent and went on big auditions, here posing for “professional” shots taken by my dad:

It’s at least partially true, though. She’s really running the show on this.

And thank goodness for this little ham, who is very much alive in me, because without her urging—without her constant presence in my mind, like a separate operating system running in the background of my consciousness—I’d have given in to the ninnies and kept avoiding something that I know, deep down, I really want to do. She’s the one letting me say yes to myself, and to being seen.

Thank goodness for her voice, shouting back at all the negative ones, real and imagined. I hear her cheering me on, telling me we’re doing this anyway, naysayers be damned. Her voice is getting louder and louder, the closer we get to Wednesday. Hopefully by then she will have completely drowned out all the others.

In any case—whether she manages that or not—it’s too late for me to back out of this.

P.S. The headline refers to a lyric in “Yes” by Morphine, which has also been running through my head as I try to embolden myself for Wednesday. So basically, my inner 10-year-old’s voice is being accompanied by that of the late, great Mark Sandman.

• Tickets for Wedneday’s event.

• My contribution to Liz Gilbert’s Letters From Love.

• My books.

• Botton, Ink.

Read the first part here.

The thing about the Six Bells Countryside Inn that I most expected to spark local opposition is the hotel’s made-up history.

According to the website: “The Six Bells takes its inspiration from a tiny shop located in the fictional village of Barrow’s Green–a small civil parish with 640 residents, depending on who is dying and how many babies are being born.”

The problem is, it’s situated in the very non-fictional village of Rosendale, NY, which already has a rich history of its own. It’s a history in which residents—especially those who are long-standing—take great pride. And it’s a pretty interesting one. I might even call it charming, and entertaining.

You can learn about it at The Century House Historical Society at the Snyder Estate, adjacent to the Widow Jane Mine, which now hosts poetry readings and other performances. Or you can pick up a copy of Thank Rosendale, by Peter P. Genero—copies of which are always on hand at Bill Brooks’ barber shop, and other local stores. Or locals will just tell you about it, at the weekly Rosendale Farmer’s Market, the annual Rosendale International Pickle Festival, or the street festival.

Locals even revel in the more colorful (or maybe off-color is a better term) parts of that history, for instance the period in the 19th century during which the town was something of a red light district for limestone miners laboring for Snyder’s Rosendale Cement company. Ditto the period in the 1960s and 70s when it was a raucous party town, with something like eighteen bars on its very short Main Street, including The Well, owned by local character (and Rosendale Street Festival founder) “Uncle Willy” Guldy, Jr., where—as I was personally informed by late town historian Dietrich Werner—you couldn’t only get booze, “You could also score all kinds of drugs, including tabs of just about any variety of acid.”

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In 1974, after Guldy closed The Well in its original location, he bought the hotel, and put another iteration of the bar there, but a fire quickly put an end to it. Back then it was called the Astoria Hotel, and Guldy rented rooms out for $21 a week or $3 a night. In the 1980s, The Rosendale Cafe was born in the hotel’s restaurant space; in the ‘90s, it moved across the street to a larger building, where it lasted until the middle of the pandemic (and where I had my wedding June 12th, 2005). It’s now Bistrot le Chat Barbu, a French restaurant, which opened earlier this year.

The hotel was still called the Astoria when I moved to town in 2005. At that time, it was a low-income SRO, and according to people I knew who occupied some of the fairly seedy efficiency apartments there, rooms rented for about $450 a month.

In the 20teens, it became The 1850s House, a boutique hotel that celebrated the town’s history with mural-sized black-and-white historical photos in each room. Now the hotel has a made-up history, which strikes me as not just weird, but also maybe not the most prudent business decision.

I’m not saying that every iteration of the hotel needs to honor the place’s history. But it seems strange to invent a new one out of whole cloth.

I really expected locals to revolt against that aspect. I’m surprised I haven’t heard a peep out them—not first hand nor second hand. I’ve heard a little bit of What is it? Who is it? Huh??? But not the kind of grumbling I’d have been sure to hear ten years ago.

***

I also just expected a certain amount of straight-up NIMBYism. In my twenty years upstate, I’ve thought a lot about NIMBYism, and had fluctuating feelings around it.

When I was on the nightlife beat for a section of The New York Times called The City (RIP), I spent a lot of time at community board meetings where accusations of NIMBYism frequently got tossed around. Every time another new bar or nightclub hoped to open downtown, community boards would hold forums, and a fair portion of residents would show up to say Hell, No.

I was on this beat from the mid-90s through the early aughts, a time when several downtown neighborhoods were beginning to resemble the tourist theme parks they’ve now been for a while, overrun with bars. Bars need liquor licenses, and the State Liquor Authority considers Community Boards’ recommendations (or lack thereof) in deciding whether to grant them. As a resident of the East Village at the time, where it was getting harder and harder to sleep at night, I understood people’s objections.

Shortly after I moved to Rosendale in 2005—when I started to see lawn signs protesting Miraval’s plans for converting the downscale Williams Lake Resort into a luxury resort and spa—I didn’t fully understand residents’ objections. As much as I loved my sleepy new town, it seemed pretty depressed to me, and as if it could use some new life—and money—injected into it. Initially the resistance seemed like some kind of toothless NIMBYism.

I’m not saying that every iteration of the hotel needs to honor the place’s history. But it seems strange to invent a new one out of whole cloth.

Then I started digging around for a possible story, and it began to make sense. The person who enlightened me the most was a realtor who had one of those anti-Miraval signs on her lawn. Before sitting down to talk with her, I wondered why a realtor of all people would resist a new development that was likely to raise property values.

She granted that it was partly because she had been a member of the Williams Lake Resort’s inexpensive beach club (I believe membership cost something like $500 a year), which had closed in anticipation of the sale to Miraval’s parent company. But much more than that, she worried the new resort would lead to a kind of accelerated gentrification that would ruin Rosendale. I came to realize she was talking about something very similar to what had happened in Manhattan—what had made me lose my home there, and led me to seek affordable housing upstate.

The opposition was trying to keep from happening in Rosendale what had happened in the city. I respected that.

***

Fast-forward nearly two-decades. The Covid pandemic brought disaster capitalism to the area in the form of many city residents buying up the real estate inventory at prices well above assessed values, with cash—they didn’t need mortgages, so it didn’t matter what value a bank assigned to a particular property. That dramatically and somewhat artificially raised home values, and thus significantly altered the home-buying market. A fair number of those homes then became full-time Airbnbs, destroying the rental market.

It’s one thing to protest a big, fancy resort. I suppose it’s more difficult to fight individual people and speculators arriving en masse, during a global pandemic that made them need to escape their tight quarters in the city. Locals had bigger things to protest during the pandemic, anyway—the senseless murders of George Floyd, Brionna Taylor, Philando Castille, and so many other Black people at the hands of law enforcement; disinformation about Covid and vaccines, and more.

Back in August, 2017—when I brought Griffin Hansbury (aka Jeremiaha Moss) up to Kingston for a talk at City Hall about his book, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul, and how to fight what he referred to as “hyper-gentrification” in our area—none of us could have predicted that coming accelerant.

To an audience of over 100, Hansbury essentially explained that it’s nearly impossible to stop the wheels of neoliberalism, and the hyper-gentrification that’s a byproduct of it. Still, he insisted, it was necessary and worthwhile to stand up against it, and document it, both locally and globally.

All of this to say: I’m kind of surprised that The People’s Republic of Rosendale didn’t put up any kind of fight when Audrey Gelman rolled into town and rewrote history.

But maybe there are more newcomers than oldtimers in Rosendale these days. Or maybe the majority of residents have grown tired of the stagnation that’s kept the place economically depressed for so long.

Personally I’d love to see more new, viable businesses come in. I’m not sure the Six Bells fits that bill.

In other news…

This essay of mine has gone somewhat viral, and has been getting some nice responses, so I thought I might share it with this crowd.

Oldster Magazine

All the Young Dudes

With just over an hour to kill before the book discussion I’d be taking part in at Book Club Bar in the East Village, I took myself to dinner at Superiority Burger. The place was mobbed, but I was in lu…

Read more

a year ago · 555 likes · 271 comments · Sari Botton

Weirdly, I feel bashful about including my own voice there and in , even though they are my publications, and I devote the lion’s share of space to writing by other people. I’m trying to overcome that!

It’s one of a few essays I’ve published this year on my way to turning 60 in October. You can find them all here. (*Ducks*)

I’m hereby launching yet another section of this newsletter called “The Kingstonian.” It’s about various aspects of my life in the Kingston, N.Y. area, along with my impressions of the way the area has changed and is changing, and how I, something of a “pioneer gentrifier,” fit into all of that.

It’s something I’ve been meaning to begin for some time, at least since I discovered, about a decade ago, that my ancestors were here from the 1860s to the 1920s, and that my great-great-great grandparents are buried in a cemetery that’s just a mile walk from my house.

Since this year marks 20 since we moved up in 2005—after losing our East Village apartment—I feel like it’s time to get going on this.

A while ago I declared that I no longer wanted to write about the area I live in—to “💩 where I eat.” But over the past few years, as more New Yorkers have migrated to the Kingston area, and I’ve investigated my ancestral roots here, something has shifted in me. I realize that I have ideas I want to explore and things I want to say.

I suppose the difference is I’m not eager to pursue all of that in a journalistic way, like I used to, which always got me in trouble with my neighbors on all sides of whatever issue I was covering. (And one time led to a town bully calling me on the phone and threatening me.) I want, instead, to pursue this in a memoiristic way. (Which will no doubt also get me into trouble, too. It’s an occupational hazard I suppose I’ve made some amount of peace with after much grappling.)

***

Where to begin…I guess I’ll start with now.

Five people so far have texted or emailed me a link to this negative review of Audrey Gelman’s Six Bells Countryside Inn on Main Street in Rosendale, by in Interview—people who know I lived there from 2005 until 2014 before moving further north to Kingston, and wrote about various aspects of the town for The New York Times, New York Magazine, and other outlets.

I’ve felt somewhat triggered since I learned a year ago that Gelman was buying what was most recently The 1850s House, a boutique hotel, and converting it into a more upscale extension of her new brand, The Six Bells. Given that I still have a soft spot for my crazy old hippie town, I have very mixed feelings about this new venture—a combination of dread, and relief that something with the vague potential to succeed has come in there.

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When I first learned of Gelman’s plans, I fully expected the more progressive factions of “The People’s Republic of Rosendale” (as a once popular bumper sticker put it) to share my mixed feelings. Actually, I expected them to oppose the new hotel in any and every way possible.

My expectation was based on what happened nineteen years ago, when a group led by AOL co-founder Steve Case put the wheels in motion for converting the low-frills Williams Lake Resort into what was originally intended to be an exclusive Miraval hotel, spa, and condos, with high-end shops, and a helicopter pad. I wrote about it for the Times in 2007.

The reigning sentiment at the time was “Keep Rosendale weird!” and it bears mentioning that the opposition had a powerful effect. Nearly two decades later, the new resort at Williams Lake is no longer slated to be a part of the posh Miraval universe; it remains in an early state of construction; and the scope of the project has been greatly scaled back, in response to the movement.

***

I’m all for weird, but I’ve also come around to believing Rosendale has resisted change and development to its detriment. It has remained largely commercially stagnant since long before I arrived in 2005. With the exception of a few businesses that have gone the distance, like the now defunct Rosendale Cafe, The Big Cheese, The Rosendale Theatre, Postmark Books, and Bill Brooks’ barber shop, most don’t really thrive or stick around long.

I’m not the only one who thinks Rosendale could benefit from a bunch of new shops and restaurants. (And J Lee’s review touches on the dearth of places to eat and shop when staying at Six Bells.)

In June, when I attended a friend’s birthday party there, I overheard two diametrically opposed opinions about what should happen to Fann’s Plaza, the shopping mall that time forgot, with a sad old Kodak film development booth deteriorating at its edge.

In my friend’s backyard, a handful of town elders spoke vehemently of the importance of shutting out a politician who wanted to develop Fann’s.

But in the front yard, residents in their 30s, 40s and 50s spoke about how great it would be if that same politician were elected, and if that led to someone constructing a low-impact, mixed-use residential/commercial development there, adding much needed housing, and new businesses.

I’ve since heard more people espousing the latter sentiment, and I agree. The tide seems to be turning in that direction; more people are realizing that Rosendale could use a major upgrade. Although, I’m not sure Six Bells is going to spark it.

***

Before people started sending me the Interview piece, I thought I might want to book a stay at Six Bells for the express purpose of writing about it. But J Lee might have covered it. I already had a hunch I’d hate the place, and the review supports it.

Last night a friend asked why I keep watching And Just Like That… if I can’t stand it. I struggled to produce and good answer, other than that I’ve been following its characters for years, and can’t help wanting to know where they go next, even if it’s rarely anywhere that doesn’t make me cringe.

I guess I’m hate-watching. Although, maybe on some unconscious level, it’s a hopeful hate-watch. Like, I’m riveted because I hope the characters will take some better turns, even though I know that’s not likely.

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In any case, I’m glad I watched the most recent episode, “The Spins,” because when Mario Cantone’s “Anthony” character uttered the words, “I’m great in the kitchen,” it rang a bell. It reminded me that back in the aughts, I wrote an advertorial series for The New York Times called “In the Kitchen With…,” and one of my subjects was Cantone. I interviewed Cantone 21 years ago, in 2004, when he was 44, and I was 39. He’s 65 now, and I’m two-and-a-half months from turning 60.

***

“In the Kitchen With…” was a pretty good gig for me. I didn’t love that my interviews were unbylined, but that allowed me sneak around one of the paper’s restrictions for journalists. If you were writing news pieces for them, you weren’t supposed to also be making bank writing their advertorial. But because at the Times, at least back then, the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing—and because the advertorial work was unbylined—I managed to get away with juggling both.

Actually, the advertorial work supported my low-paying journalism habit. While I earned many thousands of dollars for each installment of “In the Kitchen With…” I received only $400 a pop for articles I wrote for The City section, a measly $300 for a personal essay I published in that section, and just $500 for my first Modern Love essay. (They subsequently lowered the rate for Modern Love pieces, and I got only $300 for my second one.)

For the series, the Times would send me to the apartments of famous chefs—like Marcus Samuelson and Tyler Florence—or celebrities—Cantone, violinist Joshua Bell—and have them make a meal for me while I interviewed them about the ways in which they cooked at home. It was a lot of fun, and one of the best-paying “journalism” gigs I ever had. The series—presented in glossy, four-color inserts inside the Times’ cooking section—was supported by big ads from companies like Sub-Zero and Wolf. (I can’t find the color version of this piece, but I found the black-and-white version above in an old email.)

At Cantone’s Chelsea apartment, he made me his “spinach ricotta bake” and a dessert called “Congo bars.” He also entertained me for the four hours I was there. From the piece:

Think of the spinach ricotta bake as spinach lasagna without the noodles and the sauce. As Mr. Cantone mixes specially aged Sardinian pecorino from DiPalo’s in Little Italy, asiago and parmesan with ricotta and eggs, his body suddenly takes on a familiar arthritic rigidity, and it’s as if he’s been possessed by the ghost of an elderly woman. “The hump on my back is made of pecorino Romano,” he says, doing a perfect Julia Child impression. “You can just grate it in there. It’s there if anybody needs any extra.”

At the time he was promoting his 2004 one-man show, Laugh Whore, at Broadway’s Cort Theater, which was produced by Showtime, and later aired on that channel. In Cantone’s apartment, photographer Matt Carr and I got our own private performance of bits from the show, and it was hilarious. Most of all I loved his impersonations of Michael McDonald, and my singing idol, Liza Minelli.

More from the piece:

…the only living celebrity he impersonates in his act is Liza Minelli. “I’ve done Liza for Liza,” he boasts. “Fred Ebb was a friend of mine, and I used to go over and cook for him, pasta and stuffed pork chops. One night, Liza was there, and she said, ‘Do me — I know you do me!’ ” The impersonation is frighteningly close.

A clip from Laugh Whore that I found on YouTube:

Yes, And Just Like That… sucks pretty hard. But I’m glad I’m watching it, least of all so that I could be reminded me of this gig.

Often I think more about the assignments and gigs I failed to snag, which makes me doubt myself and my abilities. It’s nice to have occasion to remember the ways in which I succeeded, if scrappily and catch-as-catch-can, especially right now, when everything in this field is more uncertain than ever.

Since stories of Condé Nast’s heyday and its excesses are everywhere right now, I thought I’d add my voice to the chorus with this related experience…

“The problem,” the photographer said, “is they have too much money to blow.”

For more than a year, an essay I’d written for Glamour kept not appearing in issue after issue. Each month they’d assure me that next time it would appear, and then it wouldn’t.

The piece—about how complicated it was for me to submit to lopping off my waist-length hair—had been edited and accepted. I’d been paid in full—$3,600 for 1800 words. It would ultimately be 18 months after the originally scheduled pub date before the editor-in-chief would admit she was killing it. (At least she let me keep my whole fee.)

I’d been through three separate many-hours-long photo shoots at my hairdresser’s salon—expensive shoots, with an of-the-moment photographer who brought a whole crew of assistants; a makeup artist; a stylist who’d pulled a bunch of expensive clothes for me to wear; and a fancy caterer—not to mention my hairdresser and his assistant, who had closed the salon to other customers, and were (rightfully) charging the magazine many hundreds of dollars per hour.

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Killing the essay (and gaslighting us for a year-and-a-half about whether or not they were) wasn’t fair to any of us, not me, not the photographer, not the makeup artist, not the stylist, and not my hairdresser—who at the time was battling cancer, and emotionally buoyed by the news that he’d be featured in Glamour. (He was also the editor-in-chief’s hairdresser, and for years she had dangled the possibility of including him in the magazine’s pages.)

After Glamour killed the piece, they wouldn’t let me have the photos so I could sell it elsewhere. It wasn’t as if I could re-create the “before” photos—me with my long hair, then getting a huge length of it lopped off. They didn’t just kill it, they killed it dead.

***

The story behind the essay:

In 2002, at 37, I was tired of my long, hippie hair and desperate for a new look. But my identity was so firmly tethered to being “a long hair person” that I struggled to pull the trigger. All my life, any time I’d cut my hair above shoulder length, I suffered a complete identity crisis. (If I were writing the piece today, I’d explore my relationship to signifiers of a certain kind of femininity, but that’s not where I was at back then.) To push myself, I committed to donating a foot of the hair to a nonprofit that made wigs for children with cancer, who’d lost their hair through chemotherapy. That my hairdresser had lost his hair to chemo, too, featured in the essay.

My editor loved the idea, and the piece. It had been an easy edit, something rare in my experience with glossy magazines. When the final version was set, she handed things over to the art director, who scheduled the first shoot—which all parties assumed would be the only one.

Because I shared a hairdresser with the editor-in-chief; because he was a cancer patient, too; and because of the emotional component of my story, we went with my trusted guy. We picked a date, and the art director booked the big-deal photographer, the makeup artist, the stylist, the caterer, etc.

The shoot took an entire day. First we had to document my shedding a foot of hair. There was a lot of time spent getting the lights set up, then testing, testing, testing. After a couple hours of that, it was time for the big snip. Before, during, and after, I had to pause and pose about ninety-million times so the photographer could capture every step of the process and every micro-emotion from every possible angle.

Eventually my hairdresser bound my long locks in a hair-tie and told me to take a deep breath. When I heard and felt his scissors, I burst into tears. The photographer kept snapping shots—Polaroids and 35mm—the whole time.

The second half of the day was devoted to photos of my hairdresser styling my hair, and the end results, a wavy bob. (First a makeup artist had to deal with the puffiness of my face following the big cry.)

***

The whole thing was exhausting, but also exciting. I felt special, important. Like a real writer, a feeling I struggled to capture and hold onto in my topsy-turvy freelance life. I juggled too many little gigs that didn’t pay enough, or help me significantly build my platform. I was mostly ghostwriting other people’s books and stringing behind the scenes for The New York Times Metro section for $20/hour. I was also writing pieces for their City section (RIP) for $400 a piece, despite the enormous amount of reporting that went into each of them. Ditto Billboard, at $300 per piece. Even with my rent at just $722, I struggled to stay afloat.

In addition to trying to simply stay alive as a writer, I was also working hard to establish myself as a personal essayist. A piece I’d written for Marie Claire two years before the Glamour debacle had made a splash. (There was an entirely different kind of debacle behind that one. I hate that piece, even though other people liked it, and am very glad it’s nowhere to be found online.) The Glamour assignment had made me feel hopeful, as if I were moving in a good direction.

When the first shoot was finished, we were told the piece would be published in three months. But a few weeks later, I got a call from the art director telling me that he wasn’t happy with the way my hair had been styled in the “after” shots. He didn’t like the wavy bob; he wanted me to have a blow-out. He scheduled the second shoot for the following week, and back I went.

The same large cast of characters assembled at the salon—photographer, assistants, makeup artist, stylist, caterers, hairdressers. My stylist blew my hair out, and I didn’t feel anything like myself. The fancy clothes didn’t help. Then, as now, I tended to dress the same way I have since, oh, junior high. But I didn’t care. I just wanted my essay to be published, so I went along with it all.

The second shoot took half a day, and when it was done, I went back to being excited about the whole endeavor. But two weeks later I got another call from the art director. Someone he answered to didn’t like that I was seated in a salon chair. They wanted me on a couch. Did my hairstylist have a couch in his salon, they wanted to know. He did. Whew.

Back I went again, for another half-day-long shoot. Same high-priced crew, with the addition this time of the art director, now that he had a higher-up breathing down his neck. More hair and makeup. Another too-grown-up-looking outfit, this time, seated on a couch.

***

As I was taking part in those three time-consuming, costly shoots, it didn’t even vaguely occur to me that the essay might never see the light of day. Who would pay for so much hair, makeup, and photography, and then just throw it all away? Who would waste so many professionals’ time?

It’ll tell you who: Condé Nast in the early aughts, back when—as the photographer opined when we spoke after the piece was killed—they just had too much money to blow.

I wrote a letter to the editor-in-chief. Forget about me, I said. How could she do this to our shared hair dresser? At a time when he was sick and struggling? When the publication of my essay, and the accompanying photos bearing the fruits his hard labor, were among few things giving him hope?

She never wrote back.

In other news…

I really loved being interviewed by a couple of months ago. It’s one of my favorite interviews I’ve ever given.

Who We Are To Each Other

Aging is Power When You Let It Come Through You

Dear friends! I swear on my dog-eared Gemara, one of the best places on the internet is Oldster Magazine. Founded and run by the delicious Sari Botton, it’s the only place in media that gives a megaphone to people who are biologically old. I love it because it’s a corrective to our societal obsession with youth. I love it because the people she features…

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a year ago · 217 likes · 88 comments · Jessica Nordell

After talking and talking about someday checking out Nashville, Brian and I took my cousin ’s year-long fellowship at Vanderbilt University as an excuse to finally book cheap flights for Memorial Day weekend.

We’d been enamored with the idea of visiting “Music City USA” for years, after getting hooked on the cheesy but addictive nighttime soap, Nashville, starring Connie Britton, Hayden Panettiere, Charles Esten, to name just a few. We had the idea that someday we’d play together at one of the Monday open mics at The Bluebird Cafe, a tiny haunt where many of the show’s singer-songwriters perform. We aspired to some (emotionally better-adjusted) version of life-long on-again-off-again love birds/musical collaborators Rayna Jaymes (Britton) and Deacon Claybourne (Esten).

You can see “Rayna” and “Deacon” performing at the Bluebird in this clip below—devastating Panattiere’s character “Juliette Barnes” by reigniting their musical duo (and possibly their romance), just after Deacon and Juliette have had a fling. Also in this clip, late singer-songwriter and frequent Eagles collaborator J.D. Souther (RIP), who played record executive “Watty White”:

We got to see a show at The Bluebird that Saturday night—three excellent singer-songwriters in the round: Jamie Kent, Michaela Anne, and Ben Mulwana. Since we were leaving Monday morning, the Monday night open mic was out, and after hearing those three, I realized it was probably for the best, because they—and all the other musicians we went to see over Memorial Day Weekend—were way out of our league.

In fact, it’s a good thing we took our trip to Nashville after our mid-May gig opening for our friend Seth Branitz at The Muse in Rosendale, NY. Otherwise, we might have felt too intimidated and chickened out.

***

We weren’t in our best form that night. We hadn’t performed publicly in years, and despite rehearsing nearly every day after work for about two months, we were pretty rusty—nervous, too, which only added to our rustiness. We’d had our songs pretty well memorized, but the nervousness factor made us feel like we needed to look at the sheet music. (I always feel that way.) But the lighting made it so the music was hidden by a shadow, and not being able to view it made us even more nervous.

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We made a lot of mistakes that night—had to completely restart one song, and stopped in the middle of another when we realized we’d skipped a verse. Fortunately, it was a very forgiving crowd of mostly friends.

I will only share with you this 13-second clip of us performing a Rodney Crowell song called “You’ve Been On My Mind,” in which I feel like Brian and I are harmonizing nicely, and not fucking up:

Here’s Crowell’s version of that song:

Here’s Emmylou Harris’s version:

That evening was humbling, as was hearing so many great, very polished musicians in Nashville. Fortunately, though, those experiences didn’t make me want to give up. Instead, I want us to get better—rehearse more, and play out more, so we’re more at ease before a crowd. Do some local low-stakes open mics. Get comfortable being front and center, playing and singing in front of people again, like we used to.

***

The bar was set especially high on our first night, when we went to The Grand Ole Opry’s Friday night showcase, broadcast each week on the radio. There were eight acts, each performing three songs. They were all incredibly talented, but not all of them were our cup of tea, least of all the one who kept singing about Jesus, and the one who sang about chicks and cars and beer.

Our favorites were Tajmo, a collaboration between Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’; Ashely McBryde; veteran singer Connie Smith who debuted at the Opry back in 1965; and The Band Loula, making their Opry debut that night, and knocking us out with Logan Simmons Snelling’s deep alto vocals.

The next day we hit the National Museum of African American Music, which was incredible—so much to see and hear, and also just really cool digital installations that allowed you to make music mixes, and learn who was influenced by whom, and email yourself playlists through an electronic wristband provided at the door.

That night we went to The Bluebird. Then Sunday we visited the Country Music Hall of Fame, which was also incredible. It was cool to see a small exhibit about the career of Connie Smith, whom we’d seen Friday night at the Opry.

But even cooler, on a personal level, was seeing a whole room dedicated to Rosanne Cash (who, by the way, had once been married to Rodney Crowell). Here’s why it was so thrilling for me: the exhibit included the green leather jacket Rosanne’s father, Johnny Cash, had custom made for her, which she’d written about in her essay in Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Loving & Leaving NY, my second NYC anthology.

Next to the jacket, they had the section of the essay that she’d written about it. Except…instead of my book, they attributed it to a story she told at The Moth in 2018. It annoyed me a little—I’d commissioned that essay in a conversation I’d had with Rosanne, she wrote it specifically for my book, and I edited it. What’s more, the story had appeared in my book in 2014, four years before she told it at The Moth.

But more than annoyed I felt excited. I determined that I would send a copy of the book to the museum, and suggest they add it to the exhibit.

While at the Hall of Fame, we caught a 45-minute spotlight set by a young singer-songwriter named Jack Schneider, who Seth had heard before, and who we just loved.

That night we went to a bluegrass jam at an old dive bar called The Station Inn. The place was packed. What fun, and how inspiring to hear assorted musicians improvising together.

There was a little girl clogging along to some of the songs. She was amazing, and reminded me of Walton Goggins clogging with his mom during his SNL monologue.

***

Monday morning we were sad to leave. After wanting to go there for so long, we’d had a great visit to Nashville, thanks to cousin Seth, a great tour guide, and an even greater hang.

Now I’m busy planning some Live! events, at the upstate edition of which I’m going to bite the bullet and sing a couple of songs. (*Ducks*) I’ve got an accompanist on board, and I am going to rehearse my ass off…so I don’t choke like I did at The Muse in Rosendale.