Playwright Horton Foote died yesterday at 92. From the Hartford CT Courant: “The Texas-born Foote won his first Oscar for the screenplay of 1962′s Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which starred Gregory Peck as the honorable lawyer Atticus Finch, and his second for 1983′s “Tender Mercies,” starring Robert Duvall as a struggling country singer. [...]
Snow day! In celebration of the fact that I don’t have to do the school run, dressed in my flannel PJ pants, a hoodie, and my husband’s loafers from the mudroom, here is my favorite nightmare tale of what can go wrong when you’re not dressed properly to drop the kids in the morning. One day [...]
As I recall, little boys are obsessed not only with superheroes and cars and firemen and guns, but also the concept of jail and bad guys. As they get older, few places loom larger in their imaginations than the mythical place called Juvie. When we drive by our local Juvenile Hall en route to the indoor [...]
A couple of years ago on a big summer trip through northern California, we ordered Chinese food from a restaurant in Berkeley called King Dong. When we showed up at our friends’ house with the little white cartons, they said “We love King Dong!” They are gay, which made this even funnier. Our boys don’t remember nearly [...]
All of us except Malcolm, who is too young, went to one of Philadelphia’s best kept secrets on Friday night - this annual show. Think of it as the University of Pennsylvania’s answer to Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club, except that Mask & Wig puts on a hilarious show each year, also involving drag, instead of giving a pudding pot parade [...]
A few days ago, I got to get together with a bunch of other women bloggers in this neck of the woods. We met at the home of the Well Read Hostess, and Kristin is indeed both of those things. Also in the house were a dozen other local bloggers, but we missed Emily, who [...]
The other night Chris and I were watching Chinatown, and we both said “Hey!” when Jack Nicholson ripped an obituary out of the paper for a dead guy named Jasper Lamar Crabb. Because you just don’t see my old maiden name that often. Growing up a Crabb wasn’t easy. Kids made fun of my name, and I was [...]
Among bloggers, there’s a common, oft-bemoaned problem: “What should I write about, I’m out of ideas?!” Looking through a 100-year-old children’s book today, I realized that this problem pre-dates blogging. Even in the early 20th century, authors and editors wrung their hands when trying to wring new ideas out of thin air. How else to explain this [...]
Those of us whose first kid is poised on the edge of the nest, flapping wings and getting ready to fly away, are in a bit of a panic. I saw another mother-of-a-senior in the YMCA locker room recently. She stood there in her swimming suit, scuba mask on her head, and asked somewhat frantically “So how [...]
Last night Hugh & Malcolm came home from a weekend-long skiing trip with our church youth group. (Thank heavens for other people who will schlep our kids to the slopes, while we go out to dinner and a Pretenders concert with friends, then stay in the next night). Hugh rode back with a friend’s dad and a carful of other kids, [...]
