Haha, some things never change. I worked for Time Inc. for about 12 years and the years in New York and Amsterdam were SO dominated by the too-long cocktail hour. Also the hubris of not seeing the need to orchestrate introductions and speeches. The early 80s were the long goodbye of the ad-sales dominated culture there, but it looks like the belief in the charming ad lib has survived.

I got into cars with drunk drivers. I was a drunk driver. I rode a motorcycle without a helmet. On Mykonos in 1966, I got on a fishing boat at dawn with one other girl and a bunch of fishermen. But by far the most dangerous thing I have ever done, and I did it repeatedly even when I knew better and when I knew it reflected poorly on my self-respect, was have unprotected sex with too many men. I am grateful every day for what didn’t happen. It was great reading everyone’s adventures and victories, whether physical, social or moral. We are tremendous and amazing.

Dear Edith Ann. I could learn a lot from you. My tantrum vocabulary only has one word in it: clam up. My feelings doctor is helping me learn that I won’t blow up, die, or end the world if I express my anger. Heh. Funny what stories we tell ourselves sometimes. See ya later, alligator, but not in the elevator.

I only wish I needed this info. Maybe not the doctors… heh. Thanks for a glimpse of what’s possible.

Is it all the Rodgers and Hammerstein ones, individually and collectively, for the twilight my family happened to be in Missoula Montana (I was 12?) the night Hammerstein died, so all the songs came through the car radio against the backdrop of the purple mountains? Is it the Fantasticks, which seemed so meaningful the year I was a freshman in college? And ran for so many weeks & years that the New Yorker took to running quotes from, I think, “Portrait of an Artist…” instead of a description? Is it Gypsy, where I worked as a stage hand one summer and memorized every song (ya gotta bump it with a trumpet)?… But I think my all time favorite is The Music Man, with its so-American combination of blarney, plainness, envy (“he left River City… the Liberry building… but he left all the BOOKS to her!”) and romance.

We are probably seeing the aftermath of her hitting her head against the wall for being the Nth in a long string of wonderful women who should have known better than to get involved with Jack Nicholson. I don’t think it’s lacking in compassion to wonder “what happened.” I reserve the right to stay nosy and indulge in gossipy speculation along with all the other good-for-me and bad-for-me things I indulge in.

Most of the guys I knew in college who are still alive (survived Viet Nam and drugs) were wild then but — as far as I know — have been monogamous, if serially. While the evolutionary argument makes sense as far as it goes, we humans have come up with lots of other ways to ensure the survival of our genes. Of course we’ve also come up with a lot of ingenious ways of wiping each other out. There are those that argue that since our bodies haven’t evolved in the last 10,000 years since the invention of agriculture, it would be better to revert to a diet of fruits, roots and meat… no cultivated items like wheat or chocolate. I’d say, maybe our bodies haven’t evolved, but our minds have — enough to create poetry, the Constitution (I know, written by white men for white men, but still a miracle), concertos. So if a man uses that evolutionary thing as an excuse, it’s just that, a lame excuse.

Well, I’ve “dieted” off and on for at least 40 years, including the original Atkins that appeared in Vogue in about 1972, but that was the most faddy one. As a result my weight is fairly stable and okay, I have a pretty good idea what foods to eat for health, but my current eating suffers from an irregular schedule. So I’m like others in that I already risk my health by not getting enough sleep or exercise and eating Starbucks pastries instead of real breakfast. But… today I went to the gym and tomorrow I have another chance to be good to myself!

1. 20+% interest on a maxed out credit card 2. bank fees for bouncing checks 3. lunches out when I oversleep and don’t brown bag it. Or should #3 be the $70 a week I spend on gas to get to my under-paying job? Or perhaps the cosmetic gifts-with-purchase that I still can’t resist after selling cosmetics for a year and a half? (I thought it would get it out of my system). Anyway these items keep me too broke to spend much on other dumb things.

Good on her for getting the extension to her stay, but really, that was a palmetto bug, not a cockroach. When you live in Florida you get used to them. They are super big and don’t cluster like northern, urban cockroaches. True, it used to freak me out when one would land in my hair, but I regard them as benign. Once in awhile a gecko would wander in as well and prey on them.