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Sexual Harassment, Harvey Weinstein, & Calling our Shots
It shouldn’t take the Harvey Weinstein story and the ever-growing list of allegations against him to purge forever those predators and perverts and power-crazed men from Hollywood or Washington DC or my hometown in Northern Ireland – but perhaps it will. Such men are around every corner – on Wall Street and Main Street, in the White House and the schoolhouse,…
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A Sense of Wonder, Aging, Barmbrack, Belfast, Best friends, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Good Vibrations, Hyndford Street, In the Days Before Rock n' Roll, Irish culture, Little Feat, Madame George, Memoir, Milestones, Music, Norn Iron Soul Food, Northern Ireland, Paris Buns, pop culture, Pop Music, Pop-in Records, Record Shops, Rites of passage, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Snowball, Soundtracks of our Lives, Terri Hooley, Themes of childhood, Van Morrison, Vinyl Records, WagonWheel, When the Healing Has Begun
Caught up One More Time . . . on Cyprus Avenue
From Cyprus Avenue on Van Morrison's 70th birthday - when the familiar refrain streamed across a continent into my kitchen in the desert, and the appreciative whistles from the Belfast crowd, my whole world stopped for a second. Back street jelly roll . . .
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Arizona, Belfast Peace Lines, Berlin Wall, Borders, Bruce Springsteen, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Immigration, Phoenix, United States-Mexico Border
Achtung, baby – tear down that wall.
Families separated by their immigration status – some of them for decades – were reunited yesterday. For just three minutes during the Hugs not Walls event, relatives clung to each other in a concrete canal between the border cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez. Mothers and children, husbands and wives, grandparents and newborn babies, all on the honor system and under the watchful eye of…
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Breast Cancer Treatment, Breast Reconstruction, Chariots of Fire, Coming Home, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Mastectomy, Michael Phelps, Olympic Games, Shirley Valentine
On a mission – Michael Phelps and God and me.
I came into the pool on a mission, and the mission was accomplished ~ Michael Phelps. Watching Chad Le Clos watch Phelps go on to victory and a twentieth Olympic gold medal, I found myself thinking back to 1982’s Oscar winning best film, Chariots of Fire, and its depiction of Eric Liddell, who stunned everyone with a world record breaking gold medal win in the 400 meter…
