My husband & I want to lie around on our boat - just big enough for that. I play my concertina repertoire and read what ever’s at hand! and put on a lot of sunblock! Bless the fact that my husband is a sailor (Oh, we have seals, and pelicans, and cormorants, and ducks and starfish and even some dophins, too.)

Hillary was never a “woman candidate” to me, as Obama has never been a “black candidate” - in both, those labels didn’t mean anything to me!

The old Hollywood saw was that “there is never any pad publicity,” altho I don’t really agree with them! As for the stock market - I have never been able to afford to invest, either….Becaz they say you shouldn’t invest what you can’t afford to LOSE.

The best job was being a part of the all-star cast for the Award-winning miniseries BACKSTAIRS AT THE WHITE HOUSE. Everyone on the set was notable - the sets were fabulous and I wore an antique dress and special period hairdressing and I even had my own dressing room! Wow. Didn’t last long enough.

Actually, I would like to be out in a warm night listening to a Balinese gamelan, watching shadow puppets, drinking good champagne & not being surrounded by tourists!

Absolutely - the ones outdoors (Jefferson Airplane In Berkeley) and the ones with the light shows were the best!

Lucky you to have met those folks!

Oh, dear, it depends so much on the Smiths’ beliefs. Is the embryo a child? Or just another one of life’s attempts to procreate? (There are near misses all the time, so material can be seen as expendable, as it is a scattershot procedure…) If they are the sort to condone sperm banks, etc. maybe they should pass it on….It would be eerie to me.

A belated comment on Whoppi’s quote about the people who are doing all the talking being out of touch. In the course of my life I have met with some of those folks - and you know - they ARE isolated and out of touch but they are too arrogant to look around and find that reality out there. It’s easier for the ego to pontificate about the “little (unworthy) people” from gilded and comfy heights!

He had a fragrance which I liked - for the rest, I just looked longingly at the pix like the rest of the world. It’s the end of a time, though - isn’t it?

A costly luxury if done well - so much $ for a minor result - (and remember to the dangers of anesthesia & please have a good anesthesiologist!) but a blessing for those truly injured or deformed - those born with abnormalities or cleft palates - and, yes, I will soften my stance for female who have inherited large, masculine noses! The trick is to try to forestall the sagging of aging FIRST by diet and skin care treatment, etc. Once the damage is really done, it’s hard to really do much to reverse it! And ongoing care is also the most affordable option! Then there is the task of creating your new persona as a woman of a “certaine age” - I live in S. Calif. & I do think grown women trying to look like their school-age young daughters, wearing the same clothes, same hairdo, and so on - is absurd!

Have to add that as a child living outside NYC I grew up with the very real fear of the nuclear bomb! I was haunted by the fear of an atomic death well into my teens, when I more or less got used to it. I have never felt that secure in the universe. Any sense of security is internal and painfully won. I just try to be grateful for living day to day…

My agnostic parents were a bit candalized that my brother & I had a church-going, spirirtual bent. I went to Sunday School because I liked the ritual and the stories and the music. After experiencing several other religious traditions, I am back to the Protestant Church - and for more or less the same reasons.

I agree - I don’t think the challenges are that much different than they ever were - My father’s first job after college was in a meat packing house & he was too embarassed to tell his mother! I graduated from an Ivy League college and had a hard time getting a job because all the employers were interested in was how fast I could type! This society is two-faced in as much as it tells the kids and their parents that glorious schooling will produce glorious results - but at the same time it is producing candidates for jobs which either don’t exist or for which there are far too many candidates. No one alerted me to the shortage of jobs teaching German until I had 2 degrees in it! The European system is much more competitive, but once you have made your way through the academic sieve, there are actually suitable jobs open for you. Here it’s a Darwinian free for all. There must be some middle ground possible! That said the better educated you are in an all around sense - the better you are prepared for the fray.

Also spent my time with the Presbyterians. I was a teenager and disillusioned that the only one interested in the history of the Protestant Reformation in Sunday School was ME! Such a purist. Only came back to church years later.