Here in New England, the weather starts to shift mid-August. The heat and humidity begin to dissipate, and the days become mild and pleasant. But on the banks of the Mystic River, in Medford, things are heating up nicely.

It’s the 4th summer of the Bay State Hot Jazz Festival. From 11-3 on Saturday and Sunday, August 29 and August 30.

Saturday was fabulous, and I’ll be going back on Sunday. I don’t know the technical definition of “Hot Jazz,” but to me it seems to be the jazz of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Think Irving Berlin, Louis Armstrong, and Cab Calloway. Think jug band music and New Orleans and Memphis blues. Think string band and swing and it makes you want to get up and dance or at the very least tap your foot and shimmy your shoulders.

It’s free and it’s fun!

The primary organizer seems to be an impressive person named Annie Linders.

Bio from the festival organizers site:

Annie Linders is a bandleader, organizer, and musician in the Boston area. Born in St. Louis, MO, she has always been a fan of traditional jazz, swing, hot jazz, delta blues, and string band music. Annie plays a variety of instruments including trumpet, trombone, guitar, drums, and vocals. She is the bandleader of local trad jazz band Annie and the Fur Trappers. Annie founded the Medford Trad Jazz festival back in 2023. In addition to music, Annie enjoys playing hardcourt bicycle polo.

Here’s a link to highlights (presumably from a previous year).

Enjoy!

^{Eugène Ionesco in 1993. By Gorupdebesanez - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31006141}

Eugène Ionesco, one of the major playwrights of the movement known as Theater of the Absurd, has been having a moment, or rather a year, on the stages of greater Boston. In February, the Hub Theatre Company brought us a double bill of two of his early plays: a candy-colored rendition of The Bald Soprano, notable for its clocks that chime irregularly and too many times, followed by The Lesson, in which an instructor takes out his frustrations on a struggling student. The Bald Soprano was quite hilarious, but I honestly didn’t quite get the point of either of these plays. Both portray people speaking in non-sequiturs. Communication is impossible? There was surprise, repetition, and humor, but… why?

Of course I blamed my own lack of sophistication and insight. I remembered reading Ionesco in high school and thinking that it was supposed to be funny, but it wasn’t.

Something shifted for me in June, however, when Arlekin Players staged an adaptation of Ionesco’s Frenzy for Two called Delirium. Written twelve years after The Bald Soprano, Delirium portrays a man and a woman apparently trapped in an apartment together, arguing over pointless questions (are a turtle and a snail really the same animal?), dancing, wrestling, making love while bombs explode, boots march, and pieces of their building come clattering down around them.

Now we were in familiar territory. People carrying on and getting worked up over petty concerns while the world around them is being destroyed. Directed by the brilliant Ukrainian-American Igor Golyak and featuring the beautifully versatile Chulpan Khamatova, I’m sorry you won’t be able to see this one if you missed it.

^{Paul Giamatti (Jean) and John Turturro (Berenger). Credit: Hawver and Hall}

Here’s the good news, though. The American Repertory Theater has mounted yet another Ionesco—Rhinoceros. It’s still on stage and will be there through September 27. Directed by the acclaimed Diane Paulus with a top-notch creative team handling sound, light, scenery, and special effects (how do you get a herd of rhinoceroses into Harvard Square?), it features big-name actors John Turturro and Paul Giamatti and they are very good. See it if you can.

But why all this Ionesco? and why now? What I missed back in high school was the context in which he was writing: the aftermath of World War II and Stalinism. After that massive destruction of human life and liberty, the world seemed absurd. And now? Clearly we are living in newly absurd times with an inept clown hell-bent on destroying not just our country, but the rest of the world satisfy his insatiably insecure ego. The beauty of Ionesco well done is that he allows us to laugh at the same time that we mourn the loss of meaning and decency and find again the motivation to demand their return.

After my oldest friend died of pancreatic cancer in 2021, I “inherited” this painting. Seeing it hanging on my wall everyday inspired me to go to India to meet her lover—and the man who painted it.

My essay about our friendship and what the painting taught me about my friend is here in Chicago Story Press.

https://chicagostorypress.com/f/blue-is-the-color-of-love-by-lynne-weiss

I’m posting this a bit late because I didn’t realize my outlet, had published it, but if you are in or near the Berkshires this weekend, try to get Shakespeare & Company’s Twelfth Night on your agenda. This is a wonderful production, full of colorful costumes, hilarious actors, and infectious music. I was especially taken with Feste, the Fool, played by Nick Nudler, and the sly Andrew Aguecheek, played by J. Austyn Williamson. Shakespeare & Company really knows how to put the “shakes” in Shakespeare. If you find the Bard intimidating, or if you are with people who aren’t sure they would like him, give this one a try.

Nile Scott Studios: Nick Nudler, J. Austyn Williamson, and “ranney”

If you’re out in the Berkshires after Twelfth Night closes, check to see if they are doing their very fun Shake It Up Shakespeare re-mix. I saw it last year (it’s a little different each year) and loved it.

I suspect that most of those who see Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated film The Odyssey will not have read Homer’s version of the tale. (Not to brag, but I’ve read it three times myself—in different translations.)

Even fewer will have read my own interpretation. (Please note the author name at the bottom of the cover.)

But many of filmgoers might prefer mine. It’s only twenty-four pages long, and it includes a map, a glossary, and an index. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it is out of print.

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It was actually pretty fun to work on this. Not only did I write the text, but I did the storyboards. In other words, I mapped out what should be illustrated in each square and then reviewed the illustrations for accuracy (as in, accurately representing the story). A couple of sample spreads are shown below.

This came out in 2014, so no AI was involved. Weirdly, while I got a credit on the cover and on the copyright page, no individual is credited as an illustrator. I suppose it was someone who was a salaried employee at the company contracted to produce the series. (I also wrote one about Perseus and Medusa for the same outfit, PowerKids Press.)

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I was not on salary. In fact, I’m sure I was paid very little—probably a few hundred dollars. I wonder if Nolan would consider some kind of profit-sharing deal with me?

In any case, we have tickets for tomorrow night. Looking forward to it!

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Sometimes waiting for a table can be fun.

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[Vintage image courtesy of thegraphicsfairy.com]

A quick post before I dash off to join my neighbors in a public reading of Frederick Douglass’s “What To the Slave is the Fourth of July?” (Yeah, that’s my idea of holiday fun.)

[Frederick Douglass, 1879 George Kendall Warren, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

(Thanks to warcosts.org and americanrevolution.org for the following statistics.)

The cost of the war to the United States, in present-day dollars, is estimated at $2.4 billion. There were 25,000 Continental Army deaths and an equal number of civilian deaths. Total = 50,000 out of a total estimated population of 2.5 million people in the newly independent colonies in 1776. This of course (as in any war) does not include the numbers of people left permanently disabled, physically or psychologically, or of families left without a primary breadwinner or future source of economic support.

(Deaths listed below include deaths from illness as well as battlefield action.)

British deaths: 43, 633

Loyalist deaths: 7,000

Hessian (German) deaths: 7,774

French deaths: 2,112 on land; another 2,500 killed in action at sea and likely another 10,000-15,000 from illness

Indigenous deaths: not well-documented, but estimates suggest 500 died fighting for the British and another 1,000-2,000 died fighting for the Americans. The spread of smallpox during the war also killed thousands of warriors and more than a hundred thousand native civilians.

To finance the war, the new government printed money, which caused tremendous inflation during and for many years after the conclusion of the war. According to an economist writing at the time, “If it saved the State, it has also polluted the equity of our laws, turned them into engines of oppression and wrong, corrupted the justice of our public administration, destroyed the fortunes of thousands who had most confidence in it, enervated the trade, husbandry and manufactures of our country, and went far to destroy the morality of our people.”

But—what did it gain us?

Equal treatment for all white men? (no—only property-owners)

The end of slavery? (no)

Equal rights for women (no)

Equal access to citizenship for immigrants from Asia? (no)

Voting and political rights for free Black people? (no)

Citizenship and protection of treaties for indigenous people? (no)

Freedom from the oppressive boot of the British empire, so we would be spared the brutality faced today by Canada, Australia, and New Zealand? (hmmm)

Among the most inspiring political documents ever written? (yes)

A foundation on which to create a truly equitable and just government and society? (yes—but not without tremendous struggle)

[Fireworks, Boston Harbor. Eric Kilby from Somerville, MA, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons]

By Columbia Records - Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80616977

I still remember the first time I heard Simon and Garfunkel’s song, “The Sounds of Silence.” I must have been either 13 or about to turn 13. I was worried about becoming a teen-ager, because I knew I would be faced with new responsibilities, like caring about popular music. But I didn’t care much about most of the popular music I was hearing—I disliked Elvis Presley, who seemed to be the teen idol I was expected to like. Though I can look back at Presley now and appreciate the vigor and innovation he brought to rock n’ roll in the 1950s, he did not appeal to me in the early 1960s.

I don’t remember what time of year it was, but it must have been cold outside. It was dark out, and the windows of our family’s apartment in Frankfurt, Germany (my dad was in the U.S. Army) were steamed up from my mother’s cooking. I was setting the table; AFN, our one and only American radio station was on, and they played “The Sounds of Silence.”

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“Hello Darkness my old friend,” it began, “I’ve come to talk with you again,” in that intimate, confiding voice (it was actually two people singing, Paul Simon and his musical partner Art Garfunkel, yet their voices were so perfectly melded that I felt as though a single person was speaking to me, telling me about a way of relating to the world that was completely different from anything offered by Elvis Presley or any of the other pop musicians I knew of at the time.

Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2184065

I stopped in my tracks, unable to continue arranging forks, knives, and plates around the table, too stunned to do anything but listen to this music that talked not about love but about subway walls and tenement halls, about people bowing and praying to neon gods, about silence growing like a cancer. I couldn’t have said so at the time, but it was a critique of consumerism and inequality, of hypocrisy and selfishness, things I was starting to sense were wrong with the world but that I wasn’t yet able to articulate.

Equally amazing to me was that no one else in my family seemed to notice the song. My mother kept cooking, my father kept reading the newspaper. My sisters (4 and 8 years younger than me) probably continued with homework of playing or whatever they were doing. For me it was as though a bolt of lightning had just hit our little dining room, yet no one else in my family cared. I listened to the end, listened to the message that seemed meant for me and me alone, and then I resumed setting the table, overcome with the feeling that something had shifted in my life, that I was going to find a way of being that was different from what I saw around me.

By Columbia Records - Qobuz, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48996661

Last night, for the first time in my life, I heard Paul Simon live. He was playing at Tanglewood as part of his A Quiet Celebration tour, possibly the last tour of his life (he is 84 years old and has suffered hearing loss). After opening with his latest composition, the beautiful and meditative 33-minute “Seven Psalms,” Simon took us on a journey through the decades with songs such as “The Boxer” and “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” all wonderfully performed with his 10-piece band. It was astonishing to hear the range of his artistry—the poetry, the innovative arrangements, the depth of his spiritual seeking—and equally astonishing to think of all the brilliant songs he has written that he did not play due to lack of time.

Paul Simon, A Quiet Tour. Jake Edwards.

Following three encores, everyone else left the stage and then Simon, sitting alone on a stool with a single spotlight on him, performed an acoustic solo of “The Sound* of Silence.”

I felt as though time had collapsed in that moment, and in a way it had. Like Simon implies in his song “Slip Slidin’ Away” (at least as I interpret it), time is not linear and the older I get that clearer that is to me. Things that once seemed as though they had happened in the past are still happening, like having my breath taken away by those opening lines—”Hello Darkness, my old friend.”

* At various times it has been called “The Sounds of Silence,” but the singular seems to be Simon’s preferred version.

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Do you have a song that shifted the way you saw the world? Please share in the comments!

An essay I wrote a couple of years ago, “The Mission and the Missiles,” was published a few days ago in a wonderful literary journal called Consequence. The mission of Consequence is to address “the human consequences of war and geopolitical violence through literature and art.” The poets, essayists, and fiction writers in this latest volume include well-published writers from Palestine, Nigeria, China, India, Hungary, and Ukraine. They are writers, of course, but many are also veterans. Dewaine Farria, the author of Revolutions of All Colors, read aloud from his powerful essay, “Speaking as a Veteran,” at the launch of the latest issue the other evening.

You can read my essay here on the Consequence substack. There’s a paywall, but you can sign up for a free trial. Or you might decide to subscribe so you can explore some of the other writing featured there.

I am not a veteran, though I grew up as a military dependent; my father was a career Army sergeant who worked in the Pentagon for part of his career and who came to oppose the Vietnam War. He marched for racial and economic justice in Washington, D.C. I’ve spent much of my adult life hanging out with pacifists, and have generally defined myself that way, but I found that many pacifists have a pretty superficial understanding of people in the military or who work for the U.S. government.

And yet, lately I’ve been struggling myself with how to regard some relatives who support Trump, yet have been nothing but loving and kind to members of my family who are openly queer and gender non-conforming and to other family members who are not white. At times I want to challenge their apparent belief that policies that support ICE (and which they enthusiastically support), don’t have the potential to harm people they likely know and care about (they are white people who earn money through construction work and house-cleaning) or that the economic challenges they face are not caused by the man they voted for.

But then again, I think of Walt Whitman, that long-haired freewheeling queer poet who embraced the working classes and celebrated sensuality—even he contained unsuspected multitudes. My husband and I recently happened upon his poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” and read it with shock. It’s quite long, so I just provide the first four stanzas here:

COME my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the fore- 
 most,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond  
 the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Rudyard Kipling couldn’t have said it better—or worse—when he urged Americans to “take up the White Man’s burden” and colonize areas of the world Britain no longer had the resources to conquer.

Broadway in Boston production

Suffs is a Broadway musical that tells the story of the final years of the women’s suffrage movement, starting with the organizing of the 1913 March on Washington and ending with the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment, which removed the barrier of sex (but not necessarily factors such as race) from the right to vote.

The book (script), music, and lyrics are the work of Shaina Taub, who also plays the role of Emma Goldman in the currently running Ragtime on Broadway. In the Broadway production of Suffs, Taub played Alice Paul, the young upstart who questions the tactics of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), which had been slowly working since 1890 on a state-by-state strategy to secure suffrage for women. Taub won numerous awards for Suffs, including two Tonys, three Outer Critics Circle Awards, and two Drama Desk awards. But Suffs is not merely the story of Alice Paul. It’s the story of a movement, and the conflicts that drove it and inspired it.

Shaina Taub

(The name of NAWSA itself is the result of earlier internal conflicts within the suffrage movement: the National Women Suffrage Association, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, opposed the 15th Amendment, which gave voting rights to African American men, unless it included a provision to provide women the right to vote; the American Women Suffrage Association, founded by Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, among others, supported passage of the 15th Amendment, believing that passage would pave the way to women’s suffrage. The split in these organizations splintered the women’s suffrage movement for more than twenty years.)

The conflicts within the movement are many. Paul challenges the gradualist, “ladylike” approach of Carrie Chapman Catt, long-time leader of NAWSA. Black scholar and teacher Mary Church Terrell and famed anti-lynching activist and journalist Ida B. Wells disagree over how to respond to white organizers’ acquiescence to white southern women’s demands for a segregated march. Even among the younger white activists there are disagreements over tactics: the very concept of public demonstrations frighten some of the women while labor organizer firebrand Ruza Wenclawska wants to “burn it down.” (Spoiler alert: She finally gets her wish when the suffragists burn Wilson in effigy in front of the White House.)

All of this is conveyed with compelling characterizations and surprising historical details. True, the lyrics are sometimes repetitive, but they are written to educate as well as to entertain. There is much that is historically accurate in this telling, but a few things that are left out or altered. Dudley Malone, a member of Wilson’s administration, really did resign in protest to Wilson’s opposition to suffrage. On the other hand, Alice Paul and her loyal sidekick Lucy Burns did not meet while playing field hockey in college as portrayed in Suffs. They met in England, where both were involved in the British women’s suffrage movement, learning the radical tactics they would employ in the United States from the innovative risk-takers Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia.

Crucial to advancing the amendment for women’s suffrage was winning President Woodrow Wilson’s support. While Wilson claimed that it was the polite and ladylike tactics of NAWSA that convinced him to support the amendment, it’s clear that Paul and her allies created visibility for their cause that eventually pushed Wilson to pretend to support the suffrage movement, even as he snidely told Catt that he doubted the amendment would win ratification from the states.

Library of Congress: Suffragists holding suffrage banners in front of the White House, considered extremely un-ladylike at the time

I’m thrilled that I will have the honor of presenting the award for OUTSTANDING VISITING MUSICAL to the Broadway in Boston production of Suffs at the Elliot Norton Awards ceremony in Boston on June 1.

If you didn’t have a chance to see the show in Boston or New York, or if you’d like the chance to see it again, you can watch it on PBS Great Performances if you are a PBS sustaining member with access to Passport. (And if you are not a PBS sustaining member, please become one—they need you more than ever. Check with your local station for details. In greater Boston, it’s here.)

But sometimes they have no idea what I’m talking about as was the case yesterday. The trainer commented that she liked my socks and asked what was on them. I looked down to try to remember. “Ducks?” I said.

She sounded disappointed. “I thought they might be kangaroos.”

I looked again. “Oh!” I recognized the image on my socks on closer inspection but my mind went completely blank as to what it was called. “It’s the Mermaid of Resistance!”

“The what?”

The other two people in my small-group session looked equally astonished.

My souvenir socks, helpfully stretched out by my spouse

Like, doesn’t everyone have a pair of socks with an image of the Mermaid of Resistance on them? Apparently not.

I explained that a better name might be the Mermaid of Warsaw. But when I looked into it this morning, I learned that she is generally known as the Maid of Warsaw. Not only that, but according to legend, she and the Little Mermaid of Copenhagen were sisters.

One of many statues of the Mermaid in Warsaw. This one is in the Old Town Market Place.

But why does inland Warsaw have a mermaid as a symbol? Well, she is a river or freshwater mermaid, and there are several legends about why she began appearing on the city’s coat of arms in 1622.

Some say a Warsaw fisherman freed her from a man who had trapped her and she pledged to defend the city out of gratitude. Another legend says she aided a lost prince and he founded the city in her honor. Actually, nothing I read this morning indicates that she was connected to the Polish resistance during World War II, as I had always thought—but she is definitely connected to Polish identity in the face of conquest and oppression.

The symbol evolved over the centuries. This coat of arms of Warsaw on the title page of a ledger of Old Warsaw in 1599 literally has legs. Provided to Wikimedia Commons by the Polish Central Archives of Historical Records as part of a cooperation project with Association "Archivum Patriae" and Wikimedia Polska.

Prior to visiting Warsaw myself in 2023 (Putin’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine was very much in the air), my main association with the Mermaid was my son’s high school, which employed a stylized version of the Mermaid as its mascot.

From a gingerbread house exhibit in Poland in 2023.

The school was founded by philanthropist Charles Merrill in 1957. Merrill had visited Poland multiple times both before and after World War II. It became a second home, and the place of his death. In founding an independent school devoted to educating students who would become “decent, socially responsible, generous people,” Merrill was inspired by the courage of those who resisted and then rebuilt after Nazi occupation and war.

The logo has evolved over the decades.

“From now on,” my trainer said, after I gave her a good look at my sock, “whenever I’m wondering what I should do in a certain situation, I’m going to ask: What would the Mermaid of Resistance do?”

Apparently Pablo Picasso knew the answer to that question. When he visited post-war Warsaw in 1948 he was impressed with the energetic rebuilding of the destroyed city. His Mermaid has a hammer rather than a sword—and in contrast to the most recent Commonwealth School iteration, very big BOOBs! (no comment)

EXTENDED TO MAY 3

Central Square Theater has extended the run of Breaking the Code for an additional week, giving people new opportunities to see this excellent and gripping production. Eddie Shields is impressive as always as Alan Turing, the British mathematician and cryptologist who deciphered Nazi codes in World War II. He was credited by no less than Winston Churchill with aiding an Allied victory. Just seven years after the end of that war, however, Turing was convicted of “gross indecency” for homosexual behavior; humiliated, driven out of his profession, and placed under government surveillance. Paula Plum delivers a riveting performance as Turing’s mother, and the rest of the cast is great as well. See my review here.

If you love snarky humor and the chance to see Broadway stars close up, right here in Boston, along with a fascinating dose of local theater history, you might want to see When Playwrights Kill. It’s at the Huntington, but not produced by the Huntington. Written by Matthew Lombardo, Playwrights transforms what must have been a traumatic experience for Lombardo. In 2019, the famed and notorious Faye Dunaway was cast in Lombardo’s play “Tea at Five,” a one-woman show depicting Katherine Hepburn. Dunaway was demanding, never learned her lines, and abusive. During try outs in Boston, she was fired after she slapped a member of the crew. What Lombardo has done is create a hilarious backstage farce built of exaggerated and not-so-exaggerated versions of those events—and it all takes place at the Huntington, the same theater where those 2019 events took place. When Playwrights Kill is a farce, but its also love song to theater folks and a celebration of what they go through to get a show on the stage for us. Here’s my review.

On a very different note, but equally impressive, is What the Constitution Means to Me at Greater Boston Stage Company in Stoneham. I saw this show on Broadway in 2019, and I honestly think this version is just as compelling. Janis Hudson is the lead, and she does a great job of channeling Heidi Schreck, the playwright who turned her experiences of paying her way through college by competing for scholarship money with a speech called “What the Constitution Means to Me.” It’s no surprise that 30 years later, when Schreck was writing and performing this play, the Constitution had come to mean something very different from what it had meant to her as a teen-ager. She looks at the people left out of the formation, execution, and interpretation of the Constitution, but her examination doesn’t end there. It’s not just that women, immigrants, Black people, and Indigenous people had no hand in the creation of the document, it has actively been used to enforce their oppression through much of American history. Hudson, as Schreck, manages to deliver this message with humor and compelling examples. And guess what? Since this is all about representative government, there’s a little dose of that at the end. Here’s my review.

Neighborhood Produce, Somerville MA

I generally avoid self-checkout lines. If you want me to work for you, put me on the payroll, I say. But seriously, they are just one more way to eliminate employees and increase profits. And frankly, they are a pain if you want to put something you’ve bought in your own backpack or bag and it already has other stuff in it…

Beyond that, that little bit of human interaction, comments on the weather (usually negative) or the cashier’s nail polish (positive, of course) or even suggestions for recipes that come from paying for something at a human-staffed checkout station are good for the soul. But the other day, my husband and I had a grocery store experience that made both our days.

We’ve recently been shopping as much as possible at Neighborhood Produce. It’s not a new store, but it’s new to us. There are two of them, and the one we go to opened in 2020. While I know there are some back rooms for storage and organizing, the shopping area is pretty small. I think it’s about the size of our living room, and we live in a small house (1200 square feet).

It has two cashiers, and true to its name, a good selection of produce, much of it locally sourced, as well as some bulk grains, coffees, herbs and spices, etc. etc. For such a small size, it also has a lot if dairy basics, including yogurt, tofu, plant-based milks, and even some meats (which I don’t really look at) as well as some canned and packaged goods.

We went in on Saturday, and my husband was wearing the SWEATER. He had received so many compliments on this sweater already, but things got a little crazy in Neighborhood Produce.

(The photo he is holding is a picture of his mother, Donna Irwin (1928–2016). She knit the sweater for herself. (She liked some of her clothes big and baggy.) She loved sheep—she had life-size sheep-shaped plywood cutouts in her front yard that she covered with fleece—and chickens.

(I’m annoyed I don’t have any photos of those sheep or her chicken coop, which included hanging plants and a fan for coolness in summer or her cute little house, which was a former worker’s cottage on the edge of a DuPont estate in Wilmington, Delaware. But here’s a photo of “sheep” from an exhibit in Frankfurt, Germany. Their “fleece’ is made of tangled landline wire and their hooves are landline receivers. Don’t you love human beings and the art they create (as opposed to self-checkout)?)

Sheep in Frankfurt, Germany

Anyway, one of the cashiers in Neighborhood Produce complimented Bob on his sweater while we were shopping. He thanked her, and then he told me that it was something like the 20th compliment he’d gotten on the sweater in recent weeks. It’s a small store, remember, so I guess the other cashier heard our conversation. When we finished our shopping and went to check out, she told us that everyone in the store—about eight people—was talking about the sweater. Probably an exaggeration, but still funny.

Then I told her that Bob’s mom had knitted it, and that she had collected the hair from her sheltie dog, and had it made into yarn.

She had a comb sort of like this big one

I don’t know if the light-colored background was from the dog (whose name was Holly—you can see the beginnings of Holly’s name and image on Bob’s left sleeve) or only the darker shades used for the sheep.

A sheltie, not Donna’s

Anyway, this story just about blew the cashier’s mind. “I’m giving you a discount!” she cried, and just like that, she wiped 10% off our grocery bill.

Well, that was pretty cool, but not as cool as the sense of connection we felt with the cashiers in that little grocery store. By the time we left, we were both laughing, and somehow the day, which had been just fine before, became truly delightful.

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Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

I’ve been visiting Vienna, a city recognized as among “the world’s most livable” for its accessible healthcare, excellent education system, low cost of housing, and superb public transportation. It’s not just a coincidence that Vienna has attained this high quality of life for its residents. The Socialist Party controlled Vienna’s government from 1918 to the present day. The exception, of course, is the era of Nazi rule, which began in 1938 and was greeted with enthusiasm by all too many Viennese and lasted until the end of World War II.

Vienna is a complicated place. Like all places. Nonetheless, being here has prompted many thoughts and questions for me. Some of these questions are linked to a visit to the Viktor Frankl Center and Museum.

Interior of tram that we took to our hotel. (Lynne Weiss photo)

Another source of this high quality of life and many social innovations was the influence of Vienna’s Jews, many of them assimilated and non-observant, dating from the 19th century. This community was destroyed by the Nazis, but their influence continues through the architecture, scientific developments, music, and art developed in pre-WWII Vienna, much of which was carried throughout the rest of the world as those who were able to fled the country following the Nazi Anschluss, or annexation.

Karl-Marx-Hof, the largest and most famous of Vienna’s planned community housing projects. The Socialists of interwar Vienna were driven by a purpose—to improve the lives of the city’s residents. (Lynne Weiss photo)

A plaque outside Karl-Marx-Hof memorializes those from the community deported and murdered by the Nazi regime. (Lynne Weiss photo)

One Jewish thinker who didn’t leave was Victor Frankl. He is most famous for his book Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he describes how he and others maintained their will to live despite the horrors, humiliations, and seeming hopelessness of life in Auschwitz and other death and concentration camps.

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While in Vienna, my husband and I visited the Viktor Frankl Center and Museum. It’s more of an interactive self-analysis experience than a museum. Even before he was deported and enslaved, Frankl was a mental health provider who developed a system of therapy called Logotherapy. In contrast to his contemporaries Sigmund Freud, who saw human beings as driven by the search for pleasure, and Alfred Adler who saw them as searching for power, Frankl argued that sense of purpose was what drove human beings to find meaning in life.

One of many interactive exhibits in Frankl Museum. (from TripAdvisor)

The anecdote I found most interesting from Frankl’s life was this one: Even after the Nazi occupation, Frankl and his immediate family were protected from deportation to the camps by his position as head of psychiatry of the Rothschild Hospital. Frankl, like many Jews, applied for a visa to emigrate to the United States. In 1940 (or perhaps 1941, my memory is unclear) his visa was approved.

Frankl was torn. Should he abandon his aged parents in Vienna? Without the protection of his position, they would soon be deported. Yet the opportunity to continue his work in the United States, while protecting his wife, was also compelling.

Vienna’s synagogues had been destroyed. This is the part of the story I find especially compelling. Struggling with his decision, Frankl went to Vienna’s main Catholic cathedral, the Saint Stephens church whose spire towers above the Old Town or Inner City, to pray for an hour on the question. The Catholic Church was openly complicit with the Nazis in the effort to rid Vienna in particular and Europe generally of Jews. Why would Frankl choose this place to contemplate his decision?

Interior of Saint Stephens (Lynne Weiss)

I can’t explain this choice, except to guess that for Frankl, the sacred space of the building was separate from the politics and actions of the Church officials and adherents.

Frankl found no clarity through his prayer in Saint Stephens. Asking God for a sign, he went from the church to his parents’ apartment. His father had found, in the rubble of a destroyed synagogue, a block of marble engraved with a character. It was a character from the Fifth Commandment: Honor your father and your mother.

Frankl took this as the sign he was seeking and let his visa expire, unused. Not long after, he and his family, including his father and mother, were deported to the ghettos and death camps, where his father (Terezin Ghetto), mother and brother (Auschwitz), and his pregnant wife (Bergen-Belsen) all died or were all murdered.

From this experience arose Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, written in nine days in 1946 (and originally published anonymously). As of 2022, the book had sold 16 million copies, had been translated into 52 languages, and had been included in many lists of most influential books of the 20th century. Yet it has also been criticized for implying that those who perished in the camps did so because they failed to maintain a positive attitude. (Personally, I don’t think that is Frankl’s perspective.)

Did Frankl do the right thing in letting the visa expire? What does “doing the right thing” mean in this context?

The rest of the Fifth Commandment reads (according to one Bible website) “that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.”

Frankl lived to be 92.

Mountbatten Windsor coat of arms

So Andrew Mountbatten Windsor has been arrested. It’s about time some of these guys were finally called to task.

Oddly, his arrest got me thinking about our 2019 trip to Sweden.

A colorful map recalling the days when Sweden was major (and much feared) naval power.

We were traveling that time as members of SERVAS, an organization that connects peace activists around the world. Therefore, we had the chance to stay in the apartment of a Stockholm woman and her teenage son. Such a lovely family. Her ex-husband came over for dinner with his daughter through a new relationship and we all had a wonderful time.

bike ramps in a Swedish metro station

We got to see how their communities were organized—groups of apartment buildings clustered around the metro stations. The stations were connected by wooded bike and walking trails as well as train tracks. Each apartment cluster included a grocery store, a pre-school, an elementary school, as well as cafes and pubs and other types of shops. Each apartment courtyard had a playground. And they were intentionally built with not enough parking spaces for everyone who lived there to have a car.

Anyway, perhaps I had heard of Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. If I had, he did not loom large for me. But our host and her son were quite exercised about Prince Andrew. They insisted that he was at the bottom of the whole scandal. Later, when we were alone, I asked my traveling companion (and husband), “who is Prince Andrew?” He wasn’t sure either. I had the vague sense that he was connected to the British Royal Family, but I didn’t (and still don’t) quite know all the family tree.

Andrew, younger brother of the King of England

Elizabeth was still on the throne, and I knew she had various children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews and that those people had spouses and offspring of their own. I couldn’t be bothered to sort them out.

But now I know that the Andrew formerly known as Prince is a prince no longer and that not since the 17th century has anyone so high up in the Royal Family been arrested. I was surprised to see that he has been arrested not for sexual crimes, but for financial dealings with Epstein.

It’s interesting to me that our Swedish friends were so much more on top of this than most of the U.S. media and myself.

But here’s another moment in our visit with this Stockholm family: the son, who was probably about 15, will still smarting over some recent coverage of the Olympics in which a U.S.-based announcer had referred to Sweden as Switzerland. “Do people in the United States really not know the difference between Sweden and Switzerland,” he asked, his voice plaintive.

Sadly, I said, many of them probably didn’t. I remembered another incident during the 1992 Olympics when one of my co-workers at a publishing company (so presumably fairly literate) expressed surprise at learning that each nation has its own name for itself that is often different from the name we call them in English!!!

Push everyone with any formal authority in this nation to speak with clarity and conviction against what is happening, and to commit themselves and their organizations to ending this scourge.

Help them understand that silence in the face of this catastrophe is complicity. That there is no longer any excuse for them to be “prudently cautious,” no longer any justification for them to wait until “others take the lead.”

The emergency is now.

I started thinking about who I know who has “formal authority” at this point in my life.

Obviously, the mayor and city council of the city where I live.

The governor of my state. My elected representatives. I live in Massachusetts, a very “blue” state, and my senators and congressional rep have been fairly outspoken in their opposition to the current administration, as has our state government.

But I plan to urge them to do more. A simple statement of the obvious on the city website, on the state government’s website, to make it clear that we are united in our opposition, while simply expressing a basic principle of our government, not something that can be dismissed as partisan.

For example: We support a government of laws based on the Constitution in which Congress and the Judiciary limit the power of the Executive branch.

People in Congress have to go further. I HOPE that my senators and representative are using backchannel communications to convince a handful of ethical Republicans (I do believe there are some out there) to support an impeachment effort and ultimately a conviction to end these domestic and international outrages. I will write to them to ask them to do this.

I want to write to every nonprofit to which I contribute and urge such a statement on their part.

I urge every theatrical company to predicate each performance with such a statement, just as performances now begin with a Land Acknowledgement and a reminder to turn off cell phones.

I urge every movie theater to incorporate such a statement into its introductory video, or if that’s not possible, simply a live amplified announcement by theater management.

I urge every sports team, professional or otherwise, to follow every singing of the National Anthem with such an announcement.

I urge every museum to place a sign with such a statement at its entrance.

I am no longer involved with any schools or religious organizations, but I hope that people who are will urge similar statements for those institutions.

It’s no longer enough to be in the streets. We need to be in every building, stating the foundation of our democratic republic.

We need to assure one another that we are not alone.

[photo credit: Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons]

[photo caption: Washington, DC’s Capital TransPride was on May 20, 2017, hosted by The Studio Theatre With Ron, Vanessa, Ellie and Ronnie Ford, see: https://tinyurl.com/2f3uvzzs]

It’s also worth reading this biographical sketch of the noted writer and traveler Jan Morris, one of the earliest people to transition from one gender to another, by Elodie Barnes in Literary Ladies Guide, a site well-stocked with fascinating information about “classic women writers and their work.”

I’m trying to be more consistent in my posts, and thus looking for an organizing theme. A lot of my writing these days is theater reviews, with the occasional concert thrown in, or more recently, an event like the Kamala Harris 107 Days book tour.

I don’t want to go to the trouble of changing the title of my substack, but lately I’m thinking of the phrase “Lynne’s Wins” (a nod to the impressive Joyce Kulhawik’s Joyce’s Choices), in which I just offer brief reviews/commentaries about things that inspire and delight me. Joyce’s focus is on theater and film; I’m casting my net wider to include books, other blogs, travel experiences, and basically anything that brings pleasure in the most profound sense of insight and understanding.

So for today, I want to talk about the novel A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar. Published in 2025, this is a novel set in the near yet very recognizable future. Ma, the manager of a local shelter and food pantry, has recently obtained “climate visas” that will allow her to move to Michigan, USA, along with her father, Dadu, and her two-year-old daughter Mishti. They will join Ma’s husband who has a research position in Ann Arbor.

Near the beginning of the novel, Ma obtains all the necessary stamps on their passports. Ma is eager to go. Dadu isn’t sure, even though he knows that life in Kolkata is no longer sustainable. Climate change has made life in Kolkata increasingly uninhabitable. Fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as eggs, are nearly impossible to obtain, even for those like Ma who have “a good house” and some income.

[Indrajit Das, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons]

These shortages have led to increased crime. Thieves are everywhere. Ma herself, it turns out, is a thief, although she doesn’t see herself that way. She steals food donated to the shelter so that Mishti and her aged father will have healthy meals. Besides, they will be leaving India in seven days.

© Vyacheslav Argenberg / http://www.vascoplanet.com/, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

But a lot can happen in seven days, and a lot does happen in Majumdar’s excellently written novel. Again and again we see Ma’s hopes for immigration raised and dashed only to be raised and dashed again. Some of the barriers to the family’s reunification in Michigan result from Ma’s own behavior; others are the result of the climate—pun intended—in which they live. And Ma is not the only thief standing in the way of her plans. To Majumdar’s credit, she builds sympathy for every character in this story, even as we plummet toward an ending far more tragic than we could anticipate based on the opening pages.

It’s a short, well-paced novel (205 pages) that is likely to broaden your understanding of the full implications of climate disruption on a world-wide scale through the eyes of a very sympathetic but far from perfect set of characters.