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are days we celebrate with lovely friends. No need to wait for birthdays to share the love. But just in case he's out there, reading Live Journal and not solving scientific equations to save the world, here's wishing a Very Happy, Very Lucky Day to my March 6th Compadre and Happy Birthday Boy, docstymie Jeff.

Here's wishing you a "sloppy, but not too sloppy" day filled with love, luck and lots of laughs. Here's a little something from the Boss and The Ross. {} Something to kick this March 6th into gear. Go on. Open your present!

You, too. Yes, that means you. Dance Party!

I love Bruce Springsteen. I can't help it; I do. He was the pounding backdrop of my freshman year at Penn. He was the songs I danced to when my son was young. He is the voice in my ear in the car when I'm alone. And after 9/11 Springsteen was everywhere. His anthems. His unprettied-up love for the big things that life takes and life yields, because what do we want from the people in our lives? We want them real. We want them honest. We want them color dripped and story wide and gracious with silence, and Springsteen is that kind of person in our lives.

About "Working on a Dream," his newest album, Springsteen says this to the New York Times today : "I wanted hooks, hooks, hooks—things for people to sing, and sound that was going to lift you up. I wanted to capture the intensity and immediacy of passionate love, and then its resonance in and beyond your life. And I wanted it to sound, like, classic: verse, huge chorus, sky-opening-up strings."

My idea of a beautiful ambition.

So he's singing at the Super Bowl, and I'll be watching. He's got a new album on the way, and I'm going to get me one, stow it away, in the glove compartment of the car, set it spinning when I need thrum.

Well, okay. Finally. I've been validated. ;>

http://www.expressnightout.com/content/2009/01/born_to_write_bruce_springsteens_top_20.php

I know. I know. You're thinking: look, kid, I know Bruce Springsteen. I've played Bruce Springsteen. And you are no Bruce Springsteen.

Totally. You are right. But for one brief and shining moment, Bruce and I share something. If only a Headline.

If anyone knows how to breathe life into a character, look no further than just about any Bruce Springsteen song, not including Bruce's traditional take on his lullaby, "Pony Boy." (Don't knock the song. It worked like a charm many a sleepless night in 1992 when my baby girl needed coaxing to cross over into dreamland.)

Bruce's mom always told him he could be an author and make something of his life. (How'd that work out, Mama Springsteen?!) Some people just have a way with words and I've long dreamed of Bruce shifting hats to write a book. Someday. That man knows how to tell a story. He's written hundreds in song. But what would I give for a hold-in-your-hands Springsteen novel?

Bruce: are you out there? Need my advice? (Don't answer that.) A book, Bruce. It's not easy but if anyone was born to write, it's you. You know you want to. (Think Dancing in the Dark and your iconic rant "I'm sick of sitting 'round here trying to write this book." Oh Bruce. I can so so so relate.) Some of us procrastinate. You don't have to.

Edited to add: One of my favorite Bruce stories. Ever. Racing in the Streets. Passaic Theatre, NJ 1978. So good it hurts. A pain that says: That's me. I know that character. I feel you. These words are my story. How did he know? How did he know?

I met her on the strip three years ago
In a Camaro with this dude from L.A.
I blew that Camaro off my back and drove that little girl away
But now there's wrinkles around my baby's eyes
And she cries herself to sleep at night
When I come home the house is dark
She sighs "Baby did you make it all right"
She sits on the porch of her daddy's house
But all her pretty dreams are torn
She stares off alone into the night
With the eyes of one who hates for just being born
For all the shut down strangers and hot rod angels
Rumbling through this promised land
Tonight my baby and me we're gonna ride to the sea
And wash these sins off our hands

Elizabeth Alexander has been tapped to be Obama's Inauguration Poet.



Her name and her work are new to me. I suspect as of January 20, 2009, her name and her work will not be new to anyone within ear's reach of Planet Earth.

On inauguration day, "Graywolf plans to publish the poem as a chapbook commemorating the event and Alexander’s participation in it with a minimum first print run of 100,000 copies. The press is also planning on reprinting all of Alexander’s works, with a focus on Black Interior (2004), a collection of essays, and American Sublime (2005), her latest collection of poems, which will be reprinted in a 20,000-copy print run.

“This is the biggest thing that could happen, for Graywolf and for Elizabeth,” Mary Matze, Graywolf publicity director, said, “It’s bigger than Oprah! The entire world is going to be watching.”

Bigger than Oprah, metaphorically speaking? I say to you, Ms. Alexander's publicist, that you dream big. Metaphorically speaking. And you could be very, very right.

I am going to sound like the voiceover man for every movie trailer ever made (and THAT man, Don LaFontaine, ironically, recently passed away) but IN A WORLD... where everything is high-tech, rush-rush, old before it's new, isn't it lovely that words (poetry, prose, music) are what we turn to for inspiration and celebration? Words to lift one's spirits out of the darkness and into the light. Words that make the Universal the One.

Springsteen writes of the silence of poets muffled by the long reign of terror-- whether it is one night or eight years--in the despair of a mad world, one's emotional Jungleland:

"Outside the streets on fire in a real death waltz
Between flesh and what's fantasy
and the poets down here
Don't write nothing at all,
they just stand back and let it all be"

Remember what Don McLean sang in the closing verse of his magnum opus, AMERICAN PIE: "and the poets dreamed...But not a word was spoken." American poets of late haven't had someone to inspire them, politically speaking.

What would you write to celebrate the first day of the rest of a President-elect's life?

Sometimes politics and poetry do make awfully good bedfellows. (This would be a good time to reserve a night in Lincoln's bedroom in The White House.)

Bring back the poets!

Have you heard the news? There's good rhyming tonight. (I know. You can't get that song out of your head now, either.)

Mary Anne Hoberman is our new children's poetry laureate. Finally, talent rewarded (by more than just best-selling picture books)!

read more | digg story


photo: Lois Dreyer, published in School Library Journal

I love what Hoberman told School Library Journal in September 2007:

"I think in rhyme. That makes [my work] a [reflection of] a lot of my interior life. I'm always making up limericks, political stuff. It's something I enjoy. I love the surprises of rhyme. It throws up ideas that often wouldn't go together.

From the time I was a little girl, I adored poetry. I always have thought of poetry and the poets as a very noble calling. [Yet] I've always hesitated to put what I do into that area. I say, "Yes, I write verse." But it's interchangeable, especially now. So, yes, I write poetry. And I think some of the things [I write] maybe approach what I think of as poetry, rather than light verse."

Off the top of my head, my favorite, okay two favorite, Hoberman titles are:
A House is a House for Me
Fathers, Mothers, Sisters, Brothers

and I can't believe it took this long for someone to get down on his/her knees and reward this wordsmith for her wordplay.

To the ever-youthful Ms. Hoberman, an ode written on the spot, mad drunk with a potent mugfull of after-hours decaf with a splash of hazelnut creamer:

Clink with me with your coffee cup,
wishing that when I grow up,
though that day's long overdue,
here's to writing just like you!

I'm feeling very, er, er, yes! got it! Peter Pam-ish at the moment.

Hah! I just made myself laugh!



Hmm. Here's a new thought to me and a direct result of this Journl entry:
Because in the Universe where I live-- All Bruce, All the Time --
I wonder if the Wendy in Bruce's Born to Run is based on Peter Pan's Wendy.
The narrator in Bruce's song tells his love:

The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive
Everybody's out on the run tonight
but there's no place left to hide
Together Wendy we'll live with the sadness
I'll love you with all the madness in my soul
Someday girl I don't know when
we're gonna get to that place
Where we really want to go
and we'll walk in the sun...

Is there a PhD thesis in store for me?
Do characters ever really want to grow up and why do we make them do that? Isn't life better in that world where nothing matters but just thinkig about getting there? Does anyone ever really want to get there?

Is this where the phrase "Don't GO there" comes from? ;>

I went there.
And now I want to go back!

Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel joined forces in a concert to raise money for Barack Obama's presidential campaign and the Democratic Party on Thursday night. They got a little help from India.Arie, John Legend and Springsteen's wife, Patti Scialfa, as they tore through the rock legends' long list of hits at the Hammerstein Ballroom.

read more | digg story

Are you feeling like you need to slip into a New York State of Mind?

Yup. Me too.

Follow the link and watch
Bruce and Billy hammer and nail this song to the wall:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzA4uU0i72Y

While we were out in California, I got a voicemail from my sister thanking me for letting she and her husband stay at my house while their apartment was being painted and asking if as a thank you present we wanted to attend a Bruce Springsteen concert with them.

We thought about it for like - A NANOSECOND. I'm embarrassed to say that it had been 23 years since the last time I'd seen Bruce, and now I'm wondering why the heck I left it so long. It was AWESOME.

My sister's friend, Charlie Giordano is now playing keyboards for with the E-Street Band, and thanks to him and his wife Sarah we had passes to the E-Street lounge, where we and about a few hundred others were able to hang out and get very expensive beers before the show. We also got to meet with their adorable little daughter who is friends with my nephew, D, and who was seeing her daddy perform live on stage with the Boss for the first time. She had her very own pair of very cool ear protectors and modeled them for us.

Then it was out to the floor!



The concert started an hour late, but they played non-stop for 3 1/2 hours. It poured down with rain for about ten minutes towards the end, but none of us cared.



One of the things I love the most is seeing a performance by someone who genuinely loves performing.
It was like that when I saw Roger Waters last summer and it was like that with Bruce. It goes back to what I tell kids when I go to speak in schools - find a way to make a living out of your passion, because you'll be better at it and it'll make it much more enjoyable to get up in the morning and go to work. There's an energy, a magic, that's created when all these musicians perform together on stage with Bruce leading the festivities.



They don't call him "The Boss" for nothing.

See that shiny, flipping, dipping dot on the left-hand side of the video screens below?
Yup.
That's right.
That's me. Thursday night deep in the swamps of Jersey.
And here it is, Saturday morning:
My voice raw and raspy, my legs sore from dancing, my favorite black t-shirt now officially entrenched in my still-soaking wet skin.
But...
How happy do I look? I know. I know. ;>
There's a moral to this story:
I don't care how old you are.
When you've got it, you've got it.
My biological clock is ticking (said in my best MY COUSIN VINNIE voice) but Bruce is all the proof I need to back me up: An artist's work is never, ever done.

I haven't had the strength or guts to address the sorrow I feel in the aftermath of losing newsman and family man Tim Russert.

My heart broke as I watched Tom Brokaw make the annoucement on MSNBC Friday afternoon. No. Not Tim. Not NOW. As much as he loved his family and friends, clearly his passion for politics and this year’s election cycle in general was what drove him…

… and to think that he won’t be here to guide us through this insanity and see it to its conclusion this November is unfathomable.

58 years young. Man, life is not fair at all. Tim Russert exuded life. I pray he died a happy man, despite leaving way, way too early.

He told America’s story and now we will have to seek other voices to make it all make sense

Go get 'em, TR.

May your family and friends one day soon find great comfort and peace knowing how blessed they were to have known you. May I confess that I, too, feel blessed to have crossed paths with him in this lifetime?

To Maureen and Luke and Big Russ: Thank you all so very, very much for sharing Tim's life with us. I will never forget him. As I type these words, I see his smiling eyes on the television screen, aired during one of the tribute shows on MSNBC this weekend. I have watched each show over and over, not wanting to let go of his presence and not wanting to accept the pain of his loss. And it does hurt. And it is a great, great loss to our nation and to the world. But oh what a better world he made it. You should be very proud of all he was and all he meant and all he did. HE MATTERED.

I know I do not grieve alone. A friend just passed along this video footage to me. I presume it was from today's Meet The Press. I have not seen the show yet. But as always, when words fail me, Bruce Springsteen fills in the missing pieces and makes it all make sense. Like me, Russert was a Bruce fanatic. I cannot think of a more fitting final tribute to Tim's life and times than the footage in photos and music presented on Meet The Press today.

And there's that awful empty chair at the end.

Hard to express the pain and grief of knowing his presence is now always and forever just a spirit in the night.


Empty Chairs at Empty Tables... from Les Miserables:

"Phantom faces at the window.
Phantom shadows on the floor.
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friends will meet no more"


Crying over empty gas tanks seems so silly in the scheme of life now, doesn't it?

A late-night run for comfort food that is rated "E" for "Entertainment for Sadists."

Coffee and a dozen donuts to go, please.

Turn the key. Nothing happens. I said Go. Please. GO. PLEASE.

The car choked and coughed and froze. Dead in the parking lot of a Dunkin Donuts. How embarrassing.

Out of gas.

An apt metaphor for my personal state of affairs.

You're driving and you're heading towards the future, the road a dream that never lets you down.

And then you sputter, the wind disappears and all that's left is a numb, frozen fear the gates are closing and the map you've followed was all wrong and the time to turn around is now.

But you can't. You're tired. You have no strength. And you're out of gas.

Literally.

And when The Hero from AAA arrives to set you back on the road, you turn on the radio. Out of rote. Out of habit. And the cruel joke the Radio Therapists play on you? The first song you hear streaming from the speakers?

RUNNING ON EMPTY by Jackson Browne.

Even I had to smirk.

You can't make these things up. Not even me, the ultimate fiction-is-just-as-good-as reality writer. ;>

So as rotten as my mood was in that parking lot, where the stench of stale, midnight donuts blended with the night heat and gasoline and kids smoking cigarettes in tiny, dark circles, the music made me laugh. The music made me feel less angry. It always does.

I met with my writing circle (Can three of anything be a group?) this morning. My beloved writer/friend M shared the final page proofs of her upcoming picture book-- her first-- due out this September with Chronicle. I now understand why editors say leave the art to the artist. That the art brings another level of the story to the page. I knew the artist was well-known and I was prepared for his style. In a way, I was nervous for my friend because she was worried her vision would not mesh with his.

Hold the presses. Stop the worrying.

Her picture book is absolutely, overwhelmingly beautiful and perfect. A work of ART in every sense of the WORD. (And I mean it. Even the words in the text are ART.) We wept as we studied the page proofs at our meeting this morning. It is that good. That Great. We should all find such treasure at the end of the rainbow. This book is a golden child and I can't wait for the world to read and see what I have read and seen. I am still floating on air, as if it were my own. (After living and breathing this book in progress for g-d knows how long, one does begin to feel a sense of ownership and protectiveness to a close colleague's manuscript!) And now...oh now it is truly a Book. More than anything I could have imagined with this ol' imagination of mine. Stunning. Stunning!

I am grateful for M's friendship and mind and spirit. She's waited a long time for this moment--and now the moment is here. It's dizzying. It's happening. And it is worth the wait. Bears and cubs. Tear down these walls. Get outside. Live. Be. Write!

I know the weather has been unkind to many of the writers in our community. I suspect you've all had more than your unfair share of snow, ice storms, blizzards, and drenching rains this past, endless winter. (Don't throw beans. We never had significant snow falls down my way. Not enough to close a day of school and hence we've accrued days off in April and May. Sweet.) It's the end of March and I predict hope is just around the corner. Think butter yellow, curling flowers and damp, cool green grass and open-toe sandals and skin the color of sand, not chalk.

To help you prepare for your imminent spring awakening, I celebrate Our Spring Training by gifting this amazing concert footage of Bruce on Aug 31, 2003, his last of 10 shows held at Giants Stadium (which houses the New York teams but "is actually in New Jersey!" as Bruce likes to tease).

What are you waiting for this spring? Fresh air, cool drinks with tinkling ice cubes, the sprite dance of butterflies in the backyard, blue skies and late sunsets? Are you waiting for a sunny day? You've come to the right place. Sit down. Feast your eyes on all this glory and joy and euphoria.

A Heads Up (er, actually, Heads Down, ahem) Alert for those out there who enjoy seeing Bruce wrap his wet legs around a microphone: Pay particular attention to the 4:44 mark and beyond. You can thank me later. ;>

Your head says winter but your heart says "Is it hot in here or is it just me?" ;>

Tick tock...

So? Did you watch the video yet? What are you waiting for? Wake up. Wake up!

It's Not Just You. Swear. Now watch. Do it for me. And For You. I bet you're feeling alllll better already. ;> (Remember: Moment 4:44 on the clip. Write it down. Pay attention. This is going to be on the test.) ;>


"You're off to great places. Today is your day.
Your mountain is waiting, so get on your way."
-Dr. Seuss, OH THE PLACES YOU'LL GO

http://booktv.org/program.aspx?ProgramId=9067&SectionName=&PlayMedia=No

Noted YA Author Marc Aronson will be featured on BOOKTV.ORG at 7:00 PM, Sunday night, March 23rd, 2008. (BookTV airs on on the weekends over your C-SPAN 2 cable channel.) Aronson addresses the history of race relations in his book RACE: A HISTORY BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE. This talk was taped at the Brooklyn Public Library on February 27th, 2008. (There may be a brick or two with my name on it in libraries in my home town branches. I believe that over the years, I accrued enough late fines to be considered an investor in the infrastructure.)



Aronson tells us: "I wrote this book to make sense of race and racism now by tracing out their long history. This is a book about deep, disturbing, and personal feelings. And yet it is also about people and events hundreds, even thousands of years ago. As you'll see, I think the two are connected. Race is our modern way of handling emotions that go back to the very beginning of human evolution. That is one reason why race is so hard for us to deal with: in one way race seems as current as science, in another it taps our oldest fears." For more, please see: http://www.marcaronson.com/archives/2007/04/race_a_history.html

Without injecting personal politics into this blog entry, it goes without saying the issue of race is something that is both timely, timeless, and critical to our survival as a community of mankind.

We should be better than what we are.
We can be better than what we are.

And yes, our words matter. Words DO move mountains. Big and small.
A speech can change a life.
Think "I Have A Dream."
Words on paper, written by someone who loves words, like you, like me. And yet those words moved a nation and changed a nation. Never underestimate the gift that comes from your fingertips!


Here's something to think about.
A strange confluence of historic events:
King's I HAVE A DREAM speech: Washington, DC, August 28th, 1963.
The last day of the Democratic National Convention: Denver, Colorado,
AUGUST 28th, 2008 (See http://www.denverconvention2008.com/ )
Someone will accept the nomination of the Democratic Party on August 28th, 2008, 45 years to the day since I HAVE A DREAM entered our nation's collective conscience.

The dream goes on. For better and for worse.

Okay. Wake up. It's all right. It's all right. You're safe.

I just had a horrible dream.

I met someone in a concentration camp.
He was a musician and actor. Someone Almost Famous.
I remember him wrapping a sheet around me. As if to hold me close. Keep me warm.
We fell in love. (Survival instincts make strange bed-fellows.)
I remember the kiss that sealed our fate.
And we knew we had to run. We held hands, our thin cloth coverings wet and dirty and flapping in the rain. I was barefoot. I remember the feeling of the mud drenching and swallowing my toes, slowing me down. He kept running.

And there are the Nazis chasing me through the forest, Nazis holding me down, making me scream my allegiance to Hitler as the guns are drawn and I am sobbing.

It's not good to cry on your birthday.
Very superstitious. {}

The day can only get better-- if you call going to the dentist for major mouth surgery "better." I know. Could he have picked a worse day and told me "That's all I have"? He made me an offer I couldn't refuse. ;}

Thanks to you for the lovely thoughts here (can LJ entries be copied and pasted from one entry to another?) and in e-mail.

I need to erase this nightmare from my memory. Too real, too painful.

May God bless and keep you always,
May your wishes all come true,
May you always do for others
And let others do for you.
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung,
May you stay forever young



Added to edit after posting: Too bizarre. Check out the time this entry was posted on Live Journal. 3-0-6. Shiver me timbers! Oy! Seriously unplanned but maybe it's a sign.. The Powers that Be work in Mysterious Ways. Is it too early to start drinking? I have a feeling it's going to be ONE OF THOSE DAYS.... ;}

In my ever-obsessive need to stake my claim as a Native Daughter of the lovely borough other writers now think they discovered circa 1985, I post this hip, hot essay from author Colson Whitehead as originally read in this Sunday's New York Times Book Review section:
I WRITE IN BROOKLYN. GET OVER IT. (his title, not mine)

I started reading Colson's novel JOHN HENRY DAYS and I can't remember why I put it down. It was during Springsteen's Seeger Sessions tour and I was big on learning more about the iconic John Henry, the Steel Driving legendary hero.
(I think I stopped reading more due to my Springsteen show schedule and less because of the quality of the writing. I remember the reviews. They liked it.)

statue of John Henry

In case the memo has not reached your desk yet: Brooklyn has always been cool and kind to writers. I should know. Stamping foot, pouting lips. I was there before you. So get over it. ;>

pretty little map of Brooklyn; double click to enlarge for a better view

My cordless mouse is dying so I am about to melt into the ether, like the Wicked Witch of the West. Foiled by technology. And I have no idea where the replacement batteries are. What kind of modern convenience is this?

I so wanted to write about the biography I just bought from Amazon. I could not find it in the stores. I can't wait to crack it open and fall in: it's the biography of Betty Smith, author of one of my favorite books... wait for it... A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN. (Click link to browse its glorious, Brooklyn-authentic pages.) Better yet, because I don't want you to leave here without a gift, Browse Inside here (and don't say another disparaging word about Brookly bum-types again): ;}

Browse Inside this book Get this for your site

Needless to say, Bruce and I relate on many things, including Writer's Block. ;} (Welcome to my theme song.)

For a Good Time, Watch This... especially at the 2:57 mark

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Madison Square Garden, NYC, 10/18/07, performing DANCING IN THE DARK. I was there, way up in the rafters but for Bruce, you do what you have to do... (and a profound thank you to the kind person who shared this awesome and raw concert footage on YouTube)

I'll be leaving for my Kindling Words retreat in the Green Mountains of Vermont in a few days. Alas, I am already surrounded by mountains--white mountains of paper of my own creation and design. The hills are alive with the sound of paper. Desperate for release. Fresh air. Liberation. It is an embarrassment of riches. Now when will they leave me alone and go visit a friendly editor or two? Shall I pack them up in a basket of goodies and send them on their merry manuscriptic way? Will they be thwarted by a wolf in the heart of darkness? (Or, better yet, am I the cruel wolf thwarting my own path?)

Take that, Brothers Grimm!

Signed,
Ross Writing Hood ;>

and yes, I'm in the passenger seat.



"These two lanes will take us anywhere..."
Where I'm Coming From, what it feels like to leave the city behind and "stumble" towards the outskirts of town. Driving out of New York, driving home and into the arms of Long Island, kicking off my shoes and letting go...

My very first YouTube upload.


Pinch me. I feel as if I discovered electricity.
I YouTubed myself and.. it worked.
"Mr. Watson! Come here!"

It's Newbery/Caldecott announcement morning. Life's about to change for a few of you out there. I suspect you're not sleeping either. ;>



p.s. January 14th. Happy Birthday to my cousin David... wherever you are

This is what happens after 1: overdosing on two drinks, linguini with white clam sauce, and a Veal Francaise at the The Park Side Restaurant in Queens, where tuxedos and GODFATHER-types meet, 2: a sinus headache, 3: a snoring husband ruining any chances of a good night's sleep and 4: the curse of having a television in your bedroom and a remote control to keep you company, jumping from channel to channel until your eyes rest upon a 4 AM showing of THE GRAPES OF WRATH and you know you're not going anywhere until the credits roll.

I think, therefore I write.

You have anything better for me to do with my time in the middle of the night?

Don't answer that unless your thoughts are PG-rated. ;>

And hell if I didn't think so hard that I turned to keyboard and screen. Damn you, wretched and tempest-tossed writers. Can never keep these things to yourselves, can you? ;>

Great Characters Make Great Stories. These are the books we remember. The characters that transcend the page. The iconic voices we carry with us, speaking to us from beyond the confines of the novel and remind us, time and again, why literature is a powerful link between generations. These are the voices that inspire me to write. To paint words into life, to connect reader to reader, to be "a little piece of a big soul." Not just for today but for tomorrow.



citycatinwindow introduced me to ARTISTS FOR LITERACY, an organization that promotes music inspired by great characters and great literature. Their mission is to make literature more accessible, to marry music and the written word in order to "open doors" to a more critical analysis of a book that might otherwise be daunting to a young reader.

TOM JOAD from John Steinbeck's GRAPES OF WRATH stands tall in my pantheon of literary heroic characters. His "I'll be there" soliloquy has moved many to tears, to action-- and to music. I know. Woody Guthrie was right there, compelled to create a homage to Tom Joad after Guthrie saw the movie, THE GRAPES OF WRATH. Fast forward to another great writer who found truth and beauty in this quintessential American literary hero. Enter Bruce Springsteen. (Ah, there's always a tie that binds my words to Mr. Springsteen.)

It may not be the first question I ever ask should I have the chance to have a one-on-one moment with my muse (and, should that day ever come, I highly doubt any intelligible sounds would make it past my quivering lips), but this writer would love to ask that writer what about Steinbeck's Joad inspired him to paint his musical portrait of the Joad character in Bruce's GHOST OF TOM JOAD. Steinbeck's novel identifies a cultural war that is seeped in the soul of the American dream. After stuttering and stammering for 23 minutes in Bruce's face, telling him what hismusic has meant to me (everything), oh how I would love to ask him: "How do you see your music as a source of characters questioning what is wrong and what is right in America? Who are your characters speaking to? The choir or the disenfranchised- the believers or the estranged and alienated? Are your characters uniquely American and why? Would you rather sing to the church or a confused, wandering congregation?"

I suspect this would be his answer:



Then I would fall faint to the floor.

And... end scene!

Speaking of Page Turners: Here's to 2008-- and to you and your characters and the life you give them. (Or is it the other way around?)

newport2newport has prompted so many of our friends to share their holiday traditions here to make her spirits bright. The photos and stories are full of air and color and magic-- and a mystery to someone like me that sits this day out and can only experience it from the sidelines.

My Jewish family created its own Christmas Day Survival plan. We would head into the city and park the car somewhere off Fifth. My mother, not one to wait in lines, would sneak us all into the queues and bypass many snickering tourists. We were New Yorkers. We didn't have to wait to ogle our department store Christmas displays. (Swear. My mom's a wonderful person. Just not a very patient one.) {}


We walked across Fifth to see the tree and ice skaters at Rockefeller Center. I have thousands of childhood photos with the same background in the image below: those delicate, blinding white angels guarding the magnificent tree. We were the ones who changed, who grew older. The sight of all those lights and the smells of roasting pretzels never grew tired.



We weren't supposed to act like tourists. Buying pretzels and hot chocolate from the street vendors was something we watched others do. But hot chocolate. The creamy aroma was too much to bear. I cried that my fingers were falling off. My fingers were burning through my gloves. I whined until my parents gave in. They always did. (And I am surprised this tactic works on me today?) ;>



And, the piece de resistance, like the song says: we eat Chinese food on Christmas. (Google it. There's a viral video of this song making its way across the streets and avenues of YouTube.) Throw a movie in before or after dinner if you're really in the mood to do the Full Jewish Christmas Day Monty. ;>


one of my favorite Christmas traditions: watching A CHRISTMAS STORY; you can catch it one more time on TBS before the 24-hour marathon ends

You look around the restaurant and you just know: these diners celebrate Chanukah. You fit in. You belong. You've found a place where you're not alone in the universe!





Day was done. We made it through another Christmas Day, another institutional day that wasn't ours to celebrate but was ours to make our own rites of passage. And it worked.

I may have posted this poem before. I wrote it a year or so ago when I was feeling particularly left out of the tinsel and eggnog and giftwrap and ornaments and noels. Year after year, little kids like me learned to smile sweetly while strangers asked: "And what did you get for Christmas?"

I never knew what to say. I didn't want to be rude and say I'm Not Christian. Childhood has enough problems without adding another Not Something to the list of things you wished you were-- if only for a day. {}
______________________________________________________________

THE HAVE NOT
by Pamela Ross

Twas the twenty-fifth day
in the depths of December
I wondered why this day
was one to remember
No mistletoe hanging
No tinsel or toys
No "Merry" or "Greetings"
Just envious "oys"
While families gather
All Christmas-consumed
Their place in this wonderland
gently presumed
While children like me
learned too quickly to say
"No Santas, no presents,
Not My Holiday"
And so on this day
when the world seems to stop
No restaurants open, no markets to shop
I swallow the feeling of being a "not"
of feeling left out and a people forgot
But calendars fade
when good friends are in sight
So to all a sweet life
And to YOU a Good Write. {}

Ho ho ho,
tis the season to hold hands across the universe,
Pamela
________________________________________________________________

MERRY CHRISTMAS and HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM MY HEART TO YOURS



My Grown Up Christmas Wish for all of you: a lifetime of miracles and peace, music and laughter, health, happiness, love wherever you find it and... may all your days begin and end with a little Bruce Juice. Remember: HE knows if you've been bad or good... but he likes you better if you're good. So do I.{}

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Bruce Springsteen--THE BOSS!


Jackson 5

Happy Monday to everyone. I have some exciting news to share. Rachel Deahl wrote about yours truly in Publishers Weekly last week, check it out here. In other news, we are runners-up in the “Best of the Blogs” contest. Thanks to everyone who voted!

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