I was sad to read that Annette Funicello passed away. She was one of my favorites on the Mickey Mouse Club. This was an early post in Zero to Sixty in One Year, but I’m dusting it off for any old-timers out there who loved the show and the Mouseketeers the way I did. He… Continue Reading
Shoes Dyed to Match
A pair of orange heels on display in the shoe department caught my eye the other day and brought back this memory of a long-ago evening with a long-gone friend… When I was growing up, it was the mark of a special outfit if you got shoes dyed to match. You’d go to Leed’s, the… Continue Reading… Continue Reading
A Small Miracle
In the spring of 1984, we bought our first house. The brick planter in front of the house was full of yellow daffodils. Every spring after that, the daffodils would reappear on their own. In October of 1991, our house burned to the ground in the Oakland Hills firestorm. What was left The following… Continue Reading
What Not to Wear
When my kids were much younger, we owned a cassette version of Michael Feinstein’s Pure Imagination. (This was a long time ago!) It was a great collection of songs we all loved: Lydia the Tattooed Lady, Teddy Bear’s Picnic, Swingin’ on a Star, The Ugly Bug Ball, and the title song, from Willie Wonka and… Continue Reading
An Audience with the King!
Last summer I was invited to do a guest post for the lovely and talented Nancy Davis Kho, the music maven over at Midlife Mixtape. Thanks to Nancy, I had the chance to write about B.B King as part of her “Still in Rotation” feature. I chose to write about an album that has been… Continue Reading
Free advice! The Wisdom of Many Mothers
“Guess what, Mom?” My daughter was calling with exciting news: she and her husband were expecting! Naturally, I was eager to give her the benefit of my child-rearing expertise, based on my years of experience as a mother. Not that she asked. But then I got a better idea. Instead of just my two… Continue Reading
Heart on a Red Sleeve
It was destined to be one of those bad shopping days. Nothing fit, the colors were wrong, everything was too young, too old, too not-right. The racks in all the usual good luck places were out of magic. No marked-down sale items on hangers calling my name as I walked by. I remained unmoved by… Continue Reading
Celebrity Crush Redux
In my hormone-driven early teens, my heart belonged to a blond secret agent name Ilya Kuryakin.The handsome man with an accent you couldn’t quite place but you guessed was supposed to be Russian, what with the name and all, fought evil side by side for an hour every week with a James Bond wannabe named… Continue Reading
Great Moments in Parenting
Parents, we’ve all had these moments, right? Right?? One day my daughter invited a friend from school over to play. I’ll call this friend Jane, because that is her name. Jane was eight or nine–a year older than my daughter–and since her mom and I were friends, the girls had spent time together before, sometimes… Continue Reading