A Walk in Central Park

    I went for a walk today, like a tourist, which, in a way, we really all are-- just passing through.  It was an irresistible winter day, not something you can say very often in New York City.  But this one was, filled with sparkle, and none of the weather from the dire predictions, radiant with sunlight and warmth and the gentleness of melting snow, and a little boy named Spencer stomping on what was left of a hardening heap, crystallizing and lightly sprinkled with soot.

    I passed my friend William Shakespeare-- (I wonder if his legs were really that good,) paid the homage I always do when going by him, stopped by Robbie Burns and Sir Walter Scott, massive, wonderful statues on either side of what i think is Poet's Walk, or maybe Writer's, and wondered, as usual, what FitzGreene Halleck is doing there.  Probably he wonders, too.

    When I was first starting out in life, at that point when we allegedly determine what it is we want to be when we grow up-- in my case, way before-- I wanted to be a poet.  Pelted with poetry by my father, a pharmacist/poet manque, I had started spouting it myself at a scarily early age, and by seven or eight had aligned myself with Longfellow, probably not the best choice, but what do you know when your father's been reading The Highwayman at you.

So The Children's Hour hung heavily in my head.  You remember?

       Between the dusk and the daylight

       When the night is beginning to glower (a word I thought heavyhanded, e'en then) Comes a pause in the day's occupation

       That is known as The Children's Hour.

So sitting in the Boathouse Restaurant, looking out at the frozen lake, sipping on not a bad glass of Pinot Grigio, talking to two racily charming Italian women at the next table-- you can always make friends in New York as long as they are from someplace else-- I took out a little notebook I had brought along that had in it some poems I'd written in this park on earlier occasions, and found this:

Between the day that my life shall end

        And the year that I thought to begin it

        Came the pause in my Solipcism

        That is known as the Children's Minute.

        I hear in the bedroom above me

        The toddler that calls me "Mom,"

        And by the time I climb the stairs

        She's dressing for the prom.

The little boy with the pinchable cheeks

        Huffs and puffs up a hill of stone

        And by the time he reaches the peak

        He has two little boys of his own.

        Why didn't I spray them with some kind of glue?

        So they'd stay at that huggable age

        Oh, they say that time flies, but it literally flew

        Giving not enough time to engage.

        If we could but know at the start of the game

        That Life isn't a fair referee

        For there are no "Time outs" and there's no one to blame

        But yourself, for not stopping to see.

Oh, well.  The ladies from Italy have invited me to visit them in Lucca.       

An Afternoon in Camelot

     So as people who know me know, and even some who don't if they read any of these rantings, my great, as yet unrealized love is the musical theater-- for which I always thought I was headed, except then came the diversions: life, novels, poetry, a family.  Still, in the back of my heart and sometimes the front of my head was the big dream, which, in the past several days seemed for a moment or five that it might not be a fantasy.
     So today I settled comfortably onto my mink pillow-- Mom left a a stole-- and watched Richard Harris play King Arthur in Camelot.  Strummed through this tune is the recollection of my friendship with Nancy Olsen, the first Mrs. Alan Lerner, who wrote the brilliant book (I imagine Shaw was a bit of a help) and lyrics for what is without argument the GREAT musical of our and any other time, My Fair Lady.  Nancy told me of the day Alan came to her and said of the dazzling Micheline, who was to become his next wife: "I have to have her."  It is the kind of line I imagine he would have demanded be cut from any script that bore his name.
     But have her he did, and scuttle his happiness for a while I imagine he did, too.  She, Micheline, and I became friends for a while, and dazzling as she had been, when I knew her she had already become a little hard.  Nancy had her revenge when one sunset in Malibu, as she walked along the shore, she passed a withered woman, half-bent, and it was Micheline.  Time, the Great Avenger.
Anyway, I was excited to see Camelot all these years later, as my heart is at once light and heavy at the prospect of finally getting my dream, which I understand can also mean losing it.  In the meantime, I remembered going to Rome and meeting Franco Nero, who played Lancelot-- badly, but with gorgeous, I mean gorgeous blue eyes, and knowing he and Vanessa Redgrave, who was beautiful, and, I believe pre- political when she made the movie, had had a child together, I realize it must have been especially boring on the set even if they hadn't been so lusty.
     I had been told that Franco never bathed, but I don't remember smelling him.  Just for some reason-- was I married? Was I being faithful? or had I finally grown up, which I doubt, that transition having come much later-- I did not fall into a swoon over him, though I do remember he was funny, and that is always a good thing.  Ah, but I do remember those eyes, and am happy to have seen them up close, and not fallen into them.
     The glorious chords of the music of Camelot sounded in my little studio today, and I immediately began to weep-- my feelings are all dangerously close to the surface these days, as I have been going through crap I don't care to glorify by remembering it while I am writing these things which strangely soothe me.  So I am highly emotional even when the music isn't going all the way into me.  But I wept just to hear it at first.
     And then I saw the movie.  Richard Harris was pained and wonderful, and we've already heard about Vanessa.  But oh, the final hour when we reach the bridal bower. It is really tedious.
     I don't know who wrote the screenplay, but I imagine Lerner was stubborn about changes.  And the truth was they hadn't really worked it out for the stage, either, though I imagine we were all so swept away by the presence of Julie Andrews and Burton and the then(how was it we ever really prized him) irresistible Robert Goulet as Lancelot.  He DID have a most wonderful voice.
     I remember when Billy Rose, later to be the covered-up(not that well, but he was dead) fictional center of THE PRETENDERS, who I actually went out with a couple of times, as did my then best friend Sue Mengers, brought me home to my apartment on 73rd Street and went to my closet and opened it.  My mother had a world of wholesale connections, one of which was feathered lingerie.  So there was a peignoir, a word that sounds sexier than the robe really was, since I never actually put it on, sort of halfway between peach and orange, transparent, with matching ostrich feathers all down the front and at the bottom of the sleeves.  And Billy looked at it and said, "Who you saving this for, Robert Goulette?"  I mean he really hit the final T.  A very sad little man, lonely and scared because he'd made all the money in the world and didn't get joy from it, or spend it. (He took me to a deli, and Sue, too,at a different time, and she never forgave him.)
     He walked into Sardi's once when Sue and I were at a front table, being young.  He was with Monique Van Vooren, who everybody said gave great head.  As Sue was later to say, and I think I cited it in the novel, "With us sitting there like the Dolly Sisters."
     I think I miss her.  We did not have a very good finale, she, who was my best friend and agent when I was first starting to have a visible career, and, even more so, a visible life.  She was sort of my Maid of Honor, (Dishonor, she would have said,) at my wedding to Don at the Plaza, when she said, "We must do this every Sunday."  Then, when my play opened on Broadway, the same week my daughter was born, she said "I feel like the Mother of the Bride-- everybody's calling me."  The play failed, and so did our friendship, particularly since my bestseller, The Pretenders, was about her-- and me, too, really: the character was kind of a mix of the two of us. 
     Then she moved to Hollywood, and started to become a star.  We met again in the driveway of a party she was surprised I had been invited to, where she said, yelled out, really, to Beau Bridges, "Beau, Sue wants to fuck," and it made me sad.  I always thought she was better than that.  But maybe I was wrong.
     Then, I wrote SILK LADY, which was not quite the success THE PRETENDERS had been, but it was hot.  And once again, Louise Felder, the fictional name I gave Sue, was a central character.  She called me to ask me how I had known so much about her when we hadn't been friends for so many years, and also told me how much she liked the book.
     "The only reason I stopped reading was I could not lift my eyes, it caught me so completely," she started the conversation, not even saying 'Hello' or telling me who it was, which is how she started most conversations, assuming people would always remember her, which they did.    When next I saw her, it was at Gladys Begelman's funeral, where she chastized me for having told Liz Smith how happy I had been for her(Sue's) phone call.
      The next time I saw her, she tried to run me down in front of Phil Scully's restaurant.  And that was the last time I saw her.
      But I am happy she is having such a Renaissance, with Bette Midler, yet.  I hope there is an Afterlife, so she sees.  

OSCAR WILDE, HAPPY, and PERE LACHAISE

     Ar what turned out to be almost the last day of his life, Happy, my Yorkshire Terrier, perhaps the cleverest dog in the history of his breed-- (he had been on Oprah and would have lived forever, but she didn't show the book) -- went with me to visit Oscar Wilde. 

We had a sandwich sitting on his gravestone at Pere LaChaise. Everything in Paris was closed that day.  It was some kind of national celebration, I'm not sure which one.  Maybe July 14th, as big as it gets in Paris.  There was nothing open but the cemetery.

      So we had lunch with Oscar Wilde. That night, around the corner from my hotel, a little boy about two + was playing in the street and Happy played with him.  A very pretty, dark woman came and put a glass of champagne on my table, and said: "That is for being so kind to my son, Dorian."

    "Dorian?" said I.

    "Yes," she said. "After Dorian Gray."

     Well, those who know me, who are apparently not a multitude judging from the silence on my phone, know that I do not believe in coincidence.  All these things seem to me orchestrated, little gifts sent by the universe to connect us.  So I invited them to come visit me the next day at my hotel, the Prince de Gaulles.  Happy played with the little boy, chasing him and being chased around the hotel room, up and down the corridors.  And he was young again, a puppy, the lively little boy he'd been when he first came to live with us.  

     And after they were gone,  I went out with him to dinner, and he collapsed, stiff-legged, on the sidewalk.  I called the vet, the one we had in Paris, and he said it was a heart attack, and I should bring him in the next morning and they'd put him to sleep.  

     I called Robert and we wept together on the phone.  Then I lay Happy down on the bed beside me, and petted him, and asked him to help me.   I didn't want to put him to sleep. About four in the morning I turned on the light, and he was gone. 

     The next day I took him in his little travel bag, a purse I carried that I smuggled him in, to museums, the occasional movie, whole countries before they checked and x-rayed.  He was cremated, and I took his ashes and sprinkled a little of him on the great artists that lay in Pere La Chaise, a little but not a lot on Gertrude Stein, some on Heloise and Abelard, and put his collar on Jim Morrison's headstone.

     Strangely, I have received a card today from Dominique, the mother of Dorian, who was, in Robert's words, "the little boy who killed Happy."  Dorian has grown now, and has his own band.  I heard a little of what he played the last time I was in Paris, and it sounded really dreadful, but then I am older, and what they do now is foreign not only to my ears but all my sensibilities. So maybe he is gifted, I can't really say.

     But he has grown up looking really dark, his eyes in the photo on the card, shifting even in a still.  I hope he will be all right.  I hope Happy is.  

     And meanwhile, as I struggle with what I hope will be my return to my greatest love in the Arts, theatre, I found this quote, the same day I got the postcard from Dorian's mom.  A sign? 

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. 

    Oscar Wilde

A Metaphor for Peace

    I awoke this morning to a gently falling snow, though it's hard to tell how gentle it really is from inside this studio.  The buildings, rooftops I see from my little terrace-- don't worry, I'm not going outside-- are less than lovely, truly un-enhanced by the great monstrosity that caused the major crisis after the storm, with its dangling crane.  There are ropes and cables and ladders--- hardly the view Matisse had from his window, poor though he may have been, of Notre Dame, that I have on a postcard a new Brazilian friend gave me, stuck into the frame of the painting in front of my desk.
   But the flakes themselves, tiny, with enough space between them to qualify as individual snowdrops, are curiously soothing as they fall.  It is only when the wind picks up and sends them rushing in the same direction, that they stop being a source of tranquility.  So I see that as a metaphor for people, and realize what makes New Yorkers seem both distant and not present is that they are driven.  All on their way to something, rushing.  Nobody really where they are.  Including me. So "pure as the driven snow" might not really be a state to wish for.
   I am in the midst of a crisis so stark that even the most sanguine among you would feel a rush in the blood, and not necessarily the good kind.  At exactly the same moment, something I have wished for most of my adult life shows signs of possibly coming to be.  My lovely friend Fiona, a psychologist in Belfast, where there's usually more reason for anxiety than here, says that stress comes in good and bad- so we are affected(effected? I never can be sure)by both in less than wonderful ways.  I know that if I were to write what is happening now, the bad part, I would be thrown out of the window by my once editor, the lovable madman, Don Fine, in a rage because it is too unbelievable, at the same time it is cliche.  I don't think even a TV show would accept it, it is so horribly banal, at the same time it is excruciating.   But then there is the good part, so my day is a struggle just to stay calm and allow it all to unfold.  I should learn to imitate the snowflake, the one that simply sits on the air.  If only.
   Yesterday, in the incredible cold, I went to the 3 PM showing of QUARTET, the new film directed by Dustin Hoffmann, that features, stars, holds up for admiration, scores of British elders  as musicians in a retirement home, most especially Tom Courtenay who still looks exactly like the young Tom Courtenay, only old, and Maggie Smith, who it never mattered what she looked like.  I went the last minute, just before three, as I didn't imagine there would be anyone else going.  To my surprise and only a moment of discomfort, I could hardly find a seat.  To find the right adjective to rant joyfully about the movie seems, for the moment, out of my grasp.
   So I will tell you my little Maggie Smith story.  No matter how my life has gone, smoothly(not very often), or with jagged points in it that seemed to be aimed at my heart, I have had the good luck/curious destiny of encountering some of the fabled people on the planet, and in some instances become actual friends with them,(eg: Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Gregory Peck, and right in the midst of Watergate, my neighbor who had just moved in and came to ask to use my telephone, John Dean.) Gene Kelly was my dancing teacher in Pittsburgh when I was two.  You get the idea.
   I wrote a movie that I intended to have star my unexpected bonanza of a buddy, Cary Grant, and David Niven.  It was bought by David Niven, Jr. for his dad.  But Cary, which I still feel odd calling him, he was so impeccable, didn't want his daughter to see him on screen "looking old."  The movie was made without him, and someone sadly unsuitable in his part, all of it badly directed and rewritten, by Bryan Forbesm a man who had the balls to tell Larry Gelbart he didn't undertstand humor. But there was added a Nanny, and who played her was Maggie Smith.
   Part of my deal was tickets to the French Riviera for me and Don and my still very young family. So we went.  And besides the glory of the locale-- we quickly fled the one where they were making the movie, and, at the suggestion of my smart, loved friend the Time magazine journalist Sandra Burton, later to be murdered in Bali, who said "Everyone says 'St. Tropez, c'est finis' but I think you'll like it," went to Saint Tropez.  But while we were still in Nice, I got to hang out a little with Maggie Smith, and she was all you'd expect Maggie Smith to be, including lending me 50 francs to make a phone call.
    So when a season or five (I don't remember) later, I saw her in London in a play, in which she was (Surprise!?-not really) magnificent, I went backstage to say hello, and paid her back.  "Fifty francs," she said, looking down at the coin with her remarkable eyes. "How squalid."
    I mean to tell you, she was really Maggie Smith.
    When I came out of the theater yesterday, pumped, elated, at the same time saddened, because what the movie is about, besides being a touching love story, is growing old.  For all we might have been aware of death, nobody told us about growing old.  I talked to my once, still great editor Bob Gutwillig about writing about it, but we both agreed nobody would buy it, because that would be an admission they were getting old, and much of getting old is about denial.  Still, you couldn't tell that from the people waiting in line, in the bitter, bitter cold.  All of them, at the least, older.
    The line was very long, and it would be a while before the theater was cleaned for the next showing, and there is no waiting room inside.  But I said to one tall, still lovely woman waiting there, shivering, "It's worth it."
    She looked at me with tired but unremittingly bright eyes, and said "Is it?"
    "Absolutely," I said.
   You must go.  But go carefully.

Twying to Twitter

     I spent yesterday trying to become a person of this century.  Have a younger, eager friend who spent what seemed to me an inordinate amount of time communicating, if that is what they really do, on social media, so asked her to help me.  And because she is as sweet as she is eager, she did, although she admitted to me that now that she is so happy at her new job, she has less time for Facebook. 

    The day before having provided me with enough material for an overly long REPORT, I had saved the most moving part of it.  Needing a stretch of the legs, which you do if deskbound as I mostly am, having read that my circulation is fucked and probably my heart as well,  I went to Whole Foods on Columbus Circle, which many have renamed Whole Paycheck. In spite of myself I did a full grocery shop, mostly salmon on sale.  I also picked up several items I blithely did not pay attention to the price of, including almonds, (eat 3 daily to guard against cancer, my beloved friend Carleen had counseled,) and a whole papaya, which the distinguished literary agent Don Congdon, a friend, had eaten every day so became quite old, but now is dead anyway.

    At the checkout, which is usually a mystical experience for me, as I pay attention to the number of the window they send you to, add it up and think what it signifies(there is a meaning, one to ten, --if you ask me, I'll lay them out for you,) so I take the number I get as how the rest of my day will be. Mine added up to 10, which is Cosmic Consciousness, something I once believed in but then I was living in Southern California.  So I went happily to the right counter, and engaged in some light conversation with the clerk, a really sweet, somewhat overweight Chinese, whose name I will not give in case someone in corporate chances to read this, and he gets in trouble.  But he was kind.

      The important thing is to be kind, Aldous Huxley, once a very acid man said after his illumination.  These have been very difficult days for me,-- close friends know I am going through something I cannot talk about even with close friends-- so I have gotten through them by trying to put into practice the teachings of my beloved Jack Kornfield, who teaches Vipassana Meditation which I'm not that good at, since it involves silence.  You pay attention to the breath.  Instead, I pay close attention to every moment I am having in New York, with all its noises, but it also includes little children you pass on the street and out-of-towners who are friendlier than the people who live in your building.

     So there I was at the checkout counter, having this fairly warm exchange with the clerk and giving back the almonds, since they were too pricey, when I noticed that there was a gash in the papaya.  I said I would have to exchange it, when he suggested he might exchange it for me, asking me if I would trust him to do it, to which I responded "Of course."

    I paid for the order, gave the address for the delivery, and left my new friend.  Later that night the order came.  And in it were two papayas.  He had given me an extra one.

    All through the night when I felt sad I would get up and see that on my sink were two papayas.  It signified caring, humanity, kindness, all the things you need to wrap yourself in even if the weather isn't as bad as you expected.
     So yesterday when Melissa came to instruct me, I tried to condense that warm and loving experience into 140 characters, and tweet it.  The very word offends me.  Maybe I will learn, but I don't really think so.  Who was it that named it Twitter?  Go tweet yourself.

A Helluva Town!

    The past few days having been, as the restrained people say, as "challenging" as any in my history, beyond imagining even for an imagination as overworked as mine.  I worked on getting through it all by observing carefully what seemed real.  First there was the subway, on which I am learning to travel semi-fearlessly, though I do step far away from the edge of the platform in case there is one of those psychos who, of late, throws people onto the track when the train is coming.  Then there was 35th Street, filled with "bargains" of pseudo-Coco perfume and racks of fairly convincing and a little too colorful fake furs; then there was the showroom of Jimmy Crystal, with its jeweled glasses, which I have been wearing for several years and finally got around to having the stones re-set, as they keep falling out.  When you give your full attention to the petty you can get past the overwhelming.

    I bought an extra pair for the teller at the bank who admired them, even though we are less than friends, which the actual manager and I have become in light of my account having been mulcted, a word I learned that I thought I would never have occasion to use, but have utilized fairly often in the past week.  There were over $16,000 worth of fake charges to my Mastercard, already paid as I am on Autopay which I urge all of you to cancel if you have it, as there is better than a band of thieves working the ATMs and credit cards.  My actual ATM card, which I used on the 21st of December to get Christmas tips, was immediately mulcted for an additional $3500, in the next four minutes.  We are all trying to figure out how they do it, including the police, as it would make a great NCIS.  Then my American Express, which I never even took out of my wallet, had $1500 of fake charges.  My new best friend, Nadia, a lucky name for me, the manager of the bank told me not to suffer over it, as I will not be responsible;  my other new best friends, the cops in the station downstairs in the subway at Columbus Circle, which doesn't usually handle such things, did, as they don't want me to have to go to the precinct place a way away, since I am, to my surprise, older.

      When I went to that precinct the first time, I read the pictures on the wall, of traffic police, which is all they are supposed to be, really, who were killed in the line of duty, chasing fare evaders who then drew the cop's gun and shot them.  A heavy price to have paid for someone's not having a token.  

      My cop was still alive and a lot more savvy, a former accountant who changed professions as he was bored.  He seems quite serene now, as does the pretty policewoman who first directed me, a former journalism student who did a piece on the police and decided that was more interesting.  I am sorry Naked City is no longer on the air, as this is good stuff, as Cary Grant, my darling and fairly prominent friend used to say.

      But when I had to go back yesterday to add to the report my AMEX fraud, there was a handsome young black with earrings and his hands cuffed behind his back.  He had to be in his early twenties, tops, and his eyes were downcast, and he seemed genuinely touching.  I moved a little closer to him in what I felt would be a show of compassion, to let him know I didn't regard him as a pariah.  But then I saw that the cop behind him had a gun that the cuffed man might have grabbed and shot me and the policeman, too.  But on my way out of the station, which nobody knows is there, the glass doors are so dark and there is no sign, and if you yell 'POLICE!' which I have had to do to try and find them, nobody comes, I did wish the arrested man good luck.  It is a very sad city, in some of its more obscure corners.

      Then I went to the Fedex, the post office being closed, to send out a copy of my new book (you can get it online) The Daughter of God, which I had also given to my new best friend the bank manager, even though she is Muslim and doesn't know the Christ story (in mine, he comes back as a woman, and it's uplifting and funny but not irreverent... a lovely woman who works in the Bryn Mawr alumnae office and is married to a black Methodist mininister, says he found it "Biblically sound," which I wish I could print on the back cover.)   I was going to send a book, an old novel of mine, to my new best friend from last week, Ulisses Jung, the Brazilian, but it would have cost $111.00 so decided to wait till the post office opened which I am afraid it is not going to be doing that much longer.   I hope Ben Franklin doesn't know how badly he is being remembered.  Soon there will be no vestige of him besides electricity and swim fins, and his picture on the $100 bill which will eventually mean nothing either.

      Later I joined my beloved old friend, Steve Berger, not acquired in the course of these urban adventures but a genuine pal, a confrere of Bob Dorough, the pianist who played for me when I sang at the Mars Club in Paris, and wrote Schoolhouse Rock among other achievements besides staying for a lifetime a wonderful man.  Steve is a first rate guitarist and was also Nationals Table Tennis champion some decades back, inspired by a man who was a ping pong dynamo and partnered in SPIN, the table tennis club that has become all the rage, where last night there was a memorial for him, where everyone talked about his table tennis style and history, and not that much about what a sweet, funny man he was.  Nor did they add much of an air of uplift, except for my Steve and the amazingly lovely Susan Sarandon, who, as the gossips know, even some who are not usually gossips, left Tim Robbins for one of the owners of Spin, a very tall, and extremely affable and bright young man named Jonathan, genuinely cute, and young enough so that adjective still obtains.

     She almost literally stunned me, as she seems  genuinely present, slender and lightly curved in all the appropriate places, in a form-fitting (and why shouldn't it, when the form is still that well-shaped) black dress, with a very hip (is that word still good?) little black bag slung over one shoulder, tights, black boots and an extremely accessible and relaxed personae.    She raised a glass to the vanished co-founder, gave everybody enough champagne in theirs to salute him, and said a few excellently chosen words that elevated table-tennis to a Performing Art.

     When I was introduced to her, I told her I was a friend of Taffy, my long-time loved buddy who was one of The Starland Vocal Band who had 'Afternoon Delight' and a Grammy and would have had a great career except that they were managed by the over-rated and, in my opinion, which is constitutionally protected, egomaniacal Jerry Weintraub.  At the name 'Taffy,' Susan Sarandon did a take that would not have been out-of-line in The Three Stooges, great eyes enormously widened, with five fingers up in the air on both sides of her in a gesture of Surprise ('WHAT!)  But a second later she was once again moving effortlessly and very much at ease through the crowd, who dealt with her presence as if she were just another person.

     I must say, that did not include me.  I was blown away by her understated grandeur, and loveliness.  When I got home, I took off my make-up, and studied my own face, which I have to say is not in too bad shape considering the length of my run.  But she looks not all that different from how she appeared in Rocky Horror Show, and much as she did in Thelma and Louise.  So I would have to factor in the gods, who clearly abide by their own rules: if Talent, and Beauty, Grace and Graciousness, a sense of commitment to things that Matter, and an indulged attraction to what is vital and enjoyable keep you young, she will live forever.

   And all during this day and evening, whenever I started to think about what was really going on that I couldn't bear to think about, I wrote a song, that I sang as I moved along these alien streets.  It  the best one, I  believe, in SYLVIA WHO? which I am now convinced will actually come to be.  My job is to stay alive till it opens. 

Survival

     So in this city to which I have returned with Quixotic hopes, where it is so hard to make new friends at this point in the road, except with two and three-year olds, some of whose hands I have been holding with the permission of their maids as we walked to the corner, I believe, (hope, affirm) that it all is changing. Tuesday night I went to 54 Below, where Linda Lavin charmed me into feeling, yes... there could be an energetic, gifted performer who could play my heroine in SYLVIA WHO?, the musical comedy I have been working on as long as it took Meredith Willson to realize The Music Man.

    And tonight I went to a meeting of the National Association of Professional Women, which was nothing less than inspiring, for one whose whole career is based pretty much on inspiration.  But of course writers have no workplace, except at the desk, so it is a trip, in this case only a little way uptown, to the J.P. Morgan building (we have to assume that in spite of purported financial difficulties the company will stay solid with two facing apartment buildings on Park) to find some good souls also looking to connect. 

     The speaker was herself a trip-- a truly adorable woman.  I use that word in spite of how seriously effective she is, because it really doesn't hurt that she looks like Heidi Klum.  Karin Caro is her name, and not knowing what to expect, I thought it would be an evening of hawking our wares, talents, or, in my case my new book.  But instead Karin, as the speaker, gave an incredibly energetic and informed AND informative tour through how she had started in business at eighteen and made her way to heading companies in three countries, including El Salvador. (A pause for a plug here: one of the meditations in The Daughter of God, my new book, a surprise coming from me, even to me, is "Why lay up clothes in closets, where moths corrode.  Give them to a friend, or send them to El Salvador where God can see them."  I mean, it's funny, although the president of the organization was fearful I was a religious nut, not knowing I was the author of the sexiest bestseller of the 70s, when no matter how erotic a novel was, it still had to be well-written.

     Anyway, this in-spite-of-her-effictatiousness- darling woman told how one connected, promoted, social networked, naming websites that even those who are internet-savvy would have to be astounded by.  Most of the women there seemed to be in fields like real estate and finance, with the occasional beauty business or hope of finding what business they might want to be in.  It was, from my point of view, I who have never had a workplace, if you don't count the Comedy Development program at NBC, beyond eye-opening.  It made me sorry I wasn't a business.  Ah, if only words were merchandise.

     Karin spoke glowingly of Starbucks, as a place for young people to connect with people and maybe even find a great job through that connection, as a girl who now works for her did.  But even without that as a hope, Starbucks is a great place to work, she says, as it  has benefits even for part time workers. Who knew? Now that I do I will stop being annoyed at how long it takes to get your cappuccino.

     So it turns out, as is my own philosophy,  you just never know.  The secret is to stay alive. As long as you do that, there could be an unexpected turn. 

     These past many days, as close friends, all of whom live someplace else, know, have been beyond nightmarish, terrifying if you let yourself buckle.  My Citibank ATM was filched for $3500 more than I myself took out;  the other fraudulent withdrawals were within seconds of my taking out money for Christmas tips.  My Mastercard  was larded with $17,000 of fake charges.  And that was the good news.  It is a nightmare past  understanding or explaining what can happen to someone in New York even if they are a few years past being an innocent.

     Ah, but it does the heart good to connect with someone like Karin, whose ten-year old daughter is also in business, the profits of which go to children with handicaps.  Karin is to be honored in February by the American Heart Association to which she asked that we all give donations.  I wish I could get her to shore up the book business.