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Dear October – Please Don’t Pink for Me.
Dear October, There are 13 more days until you disappear and all your pink trappings will be removed from grocery store shelves and replaced with the amber hues of Thanksgiving. And some of us will forget to be aware of breast cancer – until next year, when you do it all again. I’m weary of you and your pink ribbon culture. I’m weary of your unrelenting message that the answer to the breast cancer epidemic which will kill over 40,000 women in the United States again this year – is to get a mammogram, feel the boobies/tatas/hooters, and raise more money “for the cure.” I’m tired of your mythology. I’m…
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American Dream, Belfast, Bob Dylan, Concerts, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Irish Diaspora, Las Vegas Shooting, Red Rocks Amphitheater, saying goodbye, Soundtracks of our Lives, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Dear Tom Petty . . .
Dear Tom, Last Friday night, you and your Heartbreakers played the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, and I was there with my boyfriend. It was his first time seeing you perform, but I’ve lost count since I first saw the Grateful Dead open for you and Bob Dylan at Rich Stadium, Buffalo, in 1986. This was special, every bit as special as I had expected, knowing you told Rolling Stone magazine last year that you’d be lying if you didn’t say it would probably be your final tour. And the Hollywood Bowl? A bucket list venue for me, the place that still conjures black and white Beatles taking America by storm,…
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2017 V by Very Blog Awards Ireland, Blogging, Blogging, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Irish Diaspora, Writing
Shortlisted People ~ Randy Newman, Susan Lucci, & Me.
I love a list. It has a beginning and an ending. It’s a certainty. A sure thing. Naturally, then, I love Rob Gordon, a kindred spirit erstwhile hapless record shop owner in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. A compulsive maker of lists which somehow make sense of a world that doesn’t always make sense, Rob’s “top fives” run the gamut of pop culture, eclectic compilations that include his top five episodes of Cheers, top five Elvis Costello songs, the top five musical crimes perpetrated by Stevie Wonder in the 80s and 90s, and the top five “women who don’t live on his street but would be very welcome.” Like Hornby’s character, I can produce all kinds of top-five lists . .…
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9.11.2013, 9/11, Anything can Happen, Belfast, Billy Collins, Blogging, bombing, British Army, cancer, Diary, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Healing Field Tempe, Loss, Memoir, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, Peace, Poetry, Remembering September 11th, Seamus Heaney, September 11, The Peace Process, The Troubles, The Troubles, Themes of Childhood, Writers
the last name on the list ~ remembering September 11th
I have yet to be disappointed by what happens when my online world collides with its ‘real’ counterpart. Landing on the virtual doorsteps of people in the middle of lives parallel to my own, I have been beautifully blindsided by unexpected coincidences and exchanges of truths that may not otherwise have seen the light of day. In my virtual home, it is easy to pull up a chair and trade ideas and opinions with people I may never meet about why Seamus Heaney will always matter; about the beautiful, bruised Northern Ireland that both scared me and shaped me; about breast cancer and the pain of it, the politics of it…
