indulgences

Just when the Seventies were starting, I looked up from my overlapping worlds of academia, motherhood, and housewifery and decided I wanted to write about dancing. Having managed to publish two pieces—both, fairly accidentally, about Twyla Tharp’s early ventures—in little-read journals, I proceeded, with the faith of the innocent, to disperse these samples among the […]

FIRST MEMORY My first memory of steps dates back to my childhood–extreme infancy, to be exact. Science tells us we don’t remember the earliest part of life, and no one I know has ever claimed to. So what makes me think that I can remember–actually feel again–the slow bump, bump, bump as my beloved Aunt […]

My mother must have had a decent command of French. Sometimes, as I was growing up, she’d refer to it, though always briefly and casually, as if the subject had little importance. All I ever found out was that she had taught elementary–perhaps even intermediate–French as well as English literature (using a textbook called From […]

Every once in so often, a friend or colleague asks to read the manuscript of a children’s book I’ve written and am trying to place, The (True) Life Story of a Dancing Cat. A number of these readers subsequently report that the story made them cry in the subway. Although I’ve published over two dozen […]

On Christmas morning last year, I walked the reservoir track in New York’s Central Park, since the gym was, naturally, closed for you-know-who’s birthday. Hundreds of people, most of them armed with cameras, were strolling around the loop in the delicious sunshine. Few of them were speaking English. I stopped to chat with a family […]

It isn’t easy, trying to buy clothes now that the years have beset the body with flaws. You can’t find garments that cover all of them except, of course, a shroud. But not yet. Sometimes I think I should wear one of those Asian or African or Indian outfits that simply swathe you in fabulous […]

My father was a doctor, a general practitioner–G.P.–as his type was called back then when it was very common. Regular patients called him “Dr. Bill,” instinctively combining honorific with nickname to indicate their respect and affection. At the age of 12 he had emigrated from Russia to the States with his mother and siblings, his […]

During a time in my life when I was feeling sad and isolated, and my own immediate circle–splendid, stimulating, and supportive people though it contained–was not offering me a certain kind of sensibility I craved, I had the maverick idea of augmenting my circle of friends with people I did not know but who were […]

Why I live in New York. New York City, that is. Manhattan, to be exact. Dirty. Dangerous. Expensive (so much so today that people who once thought of themselves as middle class now fear they’re only a few ladder-rungs above the have-nots. And the number of have-nots is heart-rending. But still . . . I […]

A young girl of my intimate acquaintance, let’s call her Eve, decided at the age of three or so that, when she grew up, she was going to be a boy. She liked to play pretend games. You may remember them from your own childhood–those acted-out narratives, full of exciting incident, that have an endless […]