I fell in love with Wendy Whalen at the end of her 30-year career as a principal dancer at New York City Ballet. Even though I lived in Manhattan while she danced with the company, somehow I never knew of her celebrity. Instead, I discovered her by sheer luck, years and years later, while madly chasing down an orchestral piece by Max Richter called On The Nature of Daylight. If...
Another migraine shreds my nervous system. They’ve been showing up more frequently the past couple of years. The assault starts in my shoulder, moves to my neck, then travels to my head where it squats for three days (always three days) before mercifully moving on. My family and close friends who know the pattern roll their eyes and plead, do something, already. I whisper back that I will. And they...
When I was 22 I won the lottery. Not the California Power Ball or Mega Millions, but the U.S. Green Card Lottery, circa 1989, awarded by the State Department to 50,000 American wannabes from around the globe in an effort to promote diversity amongst its immigrants. My fiancé at the time (a very white Canadian man) had thrown his name into the hat, and when we arrived home from our...
There’s so much noise around turning 50. Does one deny being a half-century old? Embrace the achievement? Fight like the devil to turn back the clock? Without question, this age instigates a new chapter with bigger stakes and a growing sense of urgency. Given our youth-obsessed culture and my own compulsion to stay young, I wondered how honestly I could write about this milestone. Fifty on Fifty is my experiment.
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