sarah palin is a fake feminist

It's been over ten days since Sarah Palin began running for the position of Vice President. At first I thought it was a cruel joke but now I see the joke's on me. America is rapidly becoming a country I never heard of. And if I hear one more woman telling me that Palin is a feminist, I might have to punch her out. 

Palin is a feminist the same way that I am a vegetarian, which given the fact that I eat some kind of meat probably every day, is a lie. The only thing Palin has in common with real feminists is that she believes in women's right to the vote. Otherwise, she is a throwback, a woman who wants to take away a woman's right to choose, a woman who believes in creationism (Eve sprung from Adam's rib?) and wants it taught in schools. She is also a hateful woman who thinks that being gay makes you unfit to serve in the military (or probably in public schools) and that if gays just prayed a little harder, they'd be straight Christian evangelists like her, too. 

Smarter writers than me have been going over this same material for days. I fear it's like preaching to the choir. No one person has so polarized females in the United States than Sarah Palin. I've always been amazed at how many women I know choose to believe in lies. I know women who embrace husbands who lie to them about their fidelity and their finances. I know women who choose to pull the wool over their eyes about their children and what those children are up to. I've always been amazed at the power of hypocrisy and now we have a living, breathing, completely fabricated liar who is poised perhaps to become vice president. Instead of focusing on the issues, so many Americans would rather discuss Palin's glasses. And by the way, they're fakes, too. The New York Observer reported that Palin had lasik surgery some time ago. Her glasses, which like her trailer trash backwoods hair do, are a carefully crafted part of her image, are for show only. They're plain glass. No prescription. 

granny is a toker

My mother in law who has advancing pancreatic cancer took her first puffs of marijuana the other day. Luckily she lives in California where they have medical marijuana laws and say what you will, the stuff works. She now has an appetite, is more enthusiastic about life, has regained a sense of humor and most importantly, has something to look forward to, even if it's just her next toke. 

The funniest thing she showed me when we arrived from New York to spend a week with her was the marijuana lollypops she got from a friend. My mother in law still doesn't have her legal paperwork in order to obtain the primo pot so she's 'making do' with whatever anybody gives her which seemed to me, quite a lot. She had a small handful of joints and a very crumbly pot brownie and a half dozen of these lollypops that it turns out old people like to suck on since very few of them have the dexterity at this point to roll a joint. The lollypops look exactly like regular lollypops which made me think how much fun it would be just to walk down the streets of my home town, sucking one. 

Go Granny, Go Granny, Go Granny Go. My mother in law is not exactly the little old lady from Pasadena, but right now, she's pretty close.

go west old woman

In a couple of days Mr Sax and i will be headed off to california. this is not planned to be a 'fun' visit; rather we are going to see his mother who is seriously ill. the trip could be, in fact, quite the bummer. still i am feeling a little excited about returning to california, a state (and state of mind) that i love.

i would like to say that we will visit big sur, stroll down the boardwalk in santa cruz, eat sour dough bread and order from the raw bar in sausalito and check out what's new and happenin' in the castro. northern california is not my fave part of the state although it beats the hell out of the real north north where bikers reign and people marry their cousins. get up there around oregon but before you hit the state line and you'd be surprised to meet the natives. they're never the kind of californians who are depicted on tv. on the other hand, the type A monsters who populate the silicon (that's silicon as in computer chip, not 'silicone' as in boob job, implants, or former boob job implants before everyone went for saline. Los Altos is high pressure congested and pretty ugly. Still, i want to go even if what i wind up dealing with vis a vis my mother in law is mostly sadness and despair but hey life is short and i'm getting old so while i'm on the west coast i'm going to make the best of it. 

the nerve!

I just can't get over the nerve of some people...who shall, for the time being, remain nameless. A youngish woman author (first time novelist, regular contributor -- on contract! -- to Vogue) i interviewed and wrote about (but never met in person) for the Bedford newspaper met with me for the first time. she brought her children with her. that was fine. we agreed to meet at Scoops for ice cream. what was not so fine was how she let her kid (covered in chocolate and of course she was insufficiently supplied with napkins being that the au pair, who would have remembered to grab enough had quit), take a nice healthy leak on Bedford Road 50 feet from the library. Which has a bathroom, of course. "It's ok, he's 3," she said, somewhat defensively. inside the building (at last), she proceeded to tell me how she prefers immigrant help ("they work harder,") with her kids, that she can either "write or work out" (is this an excuse for being 30 pounds overweight?) and that because she writes very slowly, very painstakingly, she must be a better writer than me. "How do people in town feel about you being a sex writer?" she asked, finding it hard to believe that the local paper's columnist and Bedford magazine contributor wouldn't be run out of town on a rail should anyone figure out that she is the author of 8 books on sex tips. Should i delete her number from my phone....or ask her to blurb me when i write my own semi-made-up book?

hiram bullock dead

A friend just sent me an email telling me of jazz guitarist hiram bullock's sudden death on friday. i can't say that i knew hiram well but i knew him a little. he dated a woman named lisa for several years back when lisa and i were friends in greenwich village. we all went to the beach together several times. by then hiram was already kind of famous but since i didn't watch Letterman and wasn't at all into jazz, i was fairly oblivious to what he was all about. what i saw was a fat, funny, genial young man lying on a towel on the beach, smoking a doobie and catching some rays. i also remember going to his apartment in a chic new trendy building on hudson street that had double height windows and gleaming white heart pine floors but no furniture except for a glass top coffee table and a couple of leather sofas. there was a rooftop health club that came with the apartment and the guests were joking that hiram had no excuse now for not working out. i know it didn't work out with lisa who also had a little thing going i think with david sanborn. lisa was into jazz musicians and more particularly black jazz guys. that was pretty par for the course at the time. jewish girls. black men. but the men had to have a special talent and not just for using cocaine.

i was surprised to see that hiram was only 52 when he died. causes as yet unknown. the band leader paul shaffer called bullock the greatest guitarist since jimi hendrix and i suppose that might be true. although some people think that pat metheny should get that title, or john scofield. i'm willing to grant that hiram really was the best...except that for most of his life, he was plagued by demons. 

hiram, you were sweet

rest in peace

i know a lot of folks are going to miss you

knolin' around

I'm starting to acquaint myself with this new Google feature on blogspot which is supposed to let the world know what i know as a published author. i suppose i should get busy and create a knol now but i'm not sure i will ever determine how to get back to it! in the meantime i'm resting on my laurels for a few minutes today after a Google alert let my husband know that i've been quoted this month in Italian Vogue! The very same issue with that big much talked about spread on Linda Evangelista! Well, well, well, it's a smidgen of the big time.

Still it was just the teensiest bit annoying when J.B. called me today to pick my brains again out with that lobster fork she calls her brain. "Do you make any money writing those little books?" she asked. "Do you just crank them out? How do you write so fast?" It's amazing how insulting one slightly chubby complaining aging moderately rich woman can be in under 30 seconds. 

Am reading a wonderful old novel right now by Doris Lessing. Doris is 88. Wonder how many more books she's got in her.

baby jesus

our new cat, jesus, is sick. this is the cat we adopted a few weeks back from our friends who moved to oregon. jesus (they named him) has a severe respiratory infection and possibly pneumonia. i was away for the weekend at candlewood lake on one of those Girls Only 2008 versions of Lost Weekend where five middle aged women wore bikinis, ate, drank, smoked, gossiped our brains out and skinny dipped at a no-electricity rustic cabin on a remote portion of the lake that you could only access by boat. once you were there, you couldn't leave. anyway, upon my return to civilization, a mere half hour away, the cat was coughing and sneezing and hiding under the bed. this morning he lay crumpled on the daybed in my office looking as though it was hard for him to breathe,  gasping now and then with his mouth open. 

they didn't keep him at the hospital overnight, which i'll take to be a good sign. instead he came home with a bag of antibiotics which will be difficult to administer, and of course if he takes a turn for the worse, i'll bring him back, but in the meantime he's resting comfortably and hopefully tonite will sleep the sleep of all well-loved and cared for cats. i'm anticipating a full recovery. it's a responsibility, adopting a cat named jesus. you can't let your very own little baby jesus pass away. 

thriling

Incredibly i see the end in sight writing my latest book. Cheers! To celebrate, today i took a long ride in the woods on my pony, Buttons, who is the great 4 legged love of my life. I love my dogs Gigi and Basil, and my cats Leo and Jesus, but Buttons and I have an entirely different story. For starters, i ride him. He carries me on his back. This is profound, really.

In the woods we came across a startling sight that in all my years in Bedford, I've never seen. Three bucks, two with huge racks, traveling together in thicket near Beaver Dam. Now all these years I've been under the impression that once they got old enough to grow antlers, guy deer shun each other's company unless they're fighting over some dame, er, deer. A female deer. A doe. Doe, a deer, as the song from "The Sound of Music," says. But these three great big guys were all hanging out together. 

"It's a stag party," one of my riding partners said. 

That sounds about right.

The Fruit Man

Sometime in the summer of 1978 I was walking down West 4th Street in NYC when this guy beckoned to me from the back of a truck. Actually it was a step-van, but the guy was using it as a truck. He was selling fruits and vegetables out of the back of it to passers-by. He held out a big juicy peach and being from South Jersey that's a hard thing for me to resist. At the very last moment as I was about to take it from his hand, he put it in his mouth and took a big bite. Then he held it out to me and I took a bite, too, and the next thing i knew we were locked in an embrace and rolling on the floor of his truck. 

The fruit guy, whose name was Jeff, and I had a thing going for a couple of years. It wasn't the healthiest of relationships but we had some good times. He had a huge black dog named Walter who lived with me most of the time. Eventually Jeff and I split for good and he moved to Seattle to get married to this actress he'd met in NYC named Sherry. The main thing I remember about Sherry was that she Wasn't Jewish and that she was Born Again. I think for awhile Jeff was Born Again. 

Flash forward to me googling around on the Sunday night of 4th of July weekend, 2008. Randomly typing in names, I typed in his. Lo and behold, Jeff has become a playwright. He's had his play produced. He also seems to have had a fruit business in Seattle called Congo Fruits and now appears to be a mortgage broker who helps people buy houses. There's an entire page of testimonials from happy clients. But the most amazing thing is how the same Jeff looks after all these years. Maybe he looks so much the same because he kept all his hair. During our time together Jeff bought me a Movado watch. He bought me a Raleigh bicycle. He bought me Hanro underwear. But the thing I liked about him the most was that he brought me peaches, bushels of peaches. And huge boxes of Washington State cherries, too. 

4th of july

Just finished reading Lynn Biederman's new YA novel, "Unraveling," which is about a frizzy haired, big boobed, sexually precocious 15 year old who can't get along with her mother. Big news. But Biederman's handling of her tragi-comic heroine is realistic and at times emotional. It brought me right back to another July 4th, in Woodbury, N.J. 1969. On the holiday everyone in town went to the high school football stadium to watch the fireworks; old people, young families with little kids, and, of course, teens looking for a little excitement.  I had a plan to meet my friend Sharon in front of the stadium at dusk, but Sharon had already hooked up. She and her steady boyfriend David were nowhere to be found. I paid my little entry fee and passed through the gate, avoiding the bleachers and the crowd for as long as possible, scanning the huge berms on either side before you went down some stairs into the actual stadium to see if I could see anybody i knew. Finally I picked a grassy spot on a steep slope of lawn and sat down. Before very long a boy, a lone wolf, came and sat down beside me. I didn't know his name, only that he was in the class or two ahead of me at the high school. Did we speak? Probably not. The fireworks started. As always, it was a big showy display of explosives that lit the sky for miles around. Boom, boom, boom, it was so loud my ears rang. The boy inched closer until our shoulders were touching.  I can still smell the sweet aroma of his Brut cologne hanging in the heavy South Jersey air. At some point he slung an arm around me and then his tongue was in my mouth. We made out. When the show was over, we were done. He stood up, brushed off his pants, said goodnight and walked off into the dark. The rest of the summer I kept an eye peeled for him in the Hardees parking lot and at the Wenonah pool but I never saw him until September when we both returned to school. Slouched against the wall by his locker, a meaty hand wrapped around his text books, he didn't look like anybody I really wanted to know better and this made me feel glad, and triumphant. 

Drinks, anyone?

After spending a small portion of the day working on my new book, "101 Things You Didn't Know About Sex," specifically writing about oddball animal mating rituals, I began doing the research on a newspaper story I'm working on about a new law being proposed in Westchester called the Social Host Law that basically throws the book or a portion of the book at parents who knowingly allow their underage offspring to throw drinking parties. Or who provide the booze or turn a blind eye to what's going on in the pool house. Up until now, as long as you didn't buy the booze or if you happened to not be at home, you couldn't be held accountable. That's all about to change if this new, more Draconian law is signed into the county legislature. 

A friend who recently held such  party told me she's so upset by the investigation the police are conducting about her son's graduation bash (ratted on as she was two weeks after the event by her next door neighbor with whom she's been feuding for years -- over a pool house, no less) that she's literally shitting blood. "I have colitis," she informed me on the phone.  No one was hurt at her party. There was no property damage. No one on the street even called the police that night to complain of any noise. Off duty local police officers were even at the party, functioning as security and overseeing the parking of all the kids' cars. At the end of the day other than embarrassment and possibly having the family's name in the paper if they do indeed have to answer to some charge, the initial punishment for breaking the Social Host Law is a fine of $250. In Bedford that's not much money, about what it costs for 4 people to have dinner out. What, I wonder, constitutes a party? Can parents be arrested for breaking the Social Host Law if they offer their kid a glass of wine with dinner in their own home? Do "other people" have to be present to make it a party? I sure don't know. 

mom's birthday

Today is my mother's birthday, or it would be if she was still alive. If my mother, whose name was Geraldine, was alive, today she would be 86 years old. I can say with some assurance that she is probably glad that she's not still around and that age. My mother was a longtime advocate of the Die Young, Leave a Pretty Corpse thing and even at 64, which is how old she was when she died (suddenly, at home, of massive heart failure), she was pretty unhappy with her looks. One of the last things we spoke of before her demise was her plan to both go on a cruise and have a face lift, although not in that order. My thinking is that if she had had the face lift and had gone on the cruise, she would have found herself another husband. He would have been Number 4. My mother was very good at attracting men, although less good at keeping husbands. Happy Birthday, Geraldine, wherever you are. 

where's the summer going?

it's been nearly a month since i've last blogged and so much has happened. our cat died, we got a new cat (and Jesus is his name), we've had a bathroom gutted, we've installed a wood stove, our son has come home from norway where he lived for six months and we bought him a new car. we also have been dealing/coping/trying to get through my mother in  law's cancer which is back again and painful. can't go there just now. 

i've been working away on my book that is due to the publisher in mid august. it's all about sex, sex, sex, what else? oh yes, flirtation. courtship tips. ever since my son has come home and we're watching reality shows together like one on peer pressure where a young woman who is a career waitress at Hooters decides she'll earn more money if she gets her boobs done. and it's true. she does. $300 a month more, woo hoo. that represents a car payment or 3 weeks worth of gas. the economy is so scary now and yet we live like we're made of money. that's so bedford, LOL

sam is coming home

sam, my amazing, awesome, incredible son, is homeward bound. he's been in norway studying for the past six months and traveling through europe and having an other-continent experience. i can't wait to see how he's changed and what his perceptions are once he returns to the states. he said a few weeks back in an email that he couldn't wait to get home because it's 'so cheap.' With gas prices over $4 a gallon it's hard for me to believe he thinks it is cheap here but compared to the way the dollar has been going against the euro never mind the kroner which is the norwegian currency, he has a point. in any case, now i have to clean his blinds and air out his room and get ready for the sound of drums all the time. did i mention he's a big fan of metal rock? should be a fun, noisy summer. 

whatsamatter with me?

dear blog,

i am so depressed. a woman who saw me writing in a very twee Indian journal where the paper's all handmade and pressed with bits of flowers said to me very sweetly, "Oh, writing in your journal?" I said something awful in response, like i don't write in journals and in fact don't believe in journaling, she said why and i said "Cos you can't make any money off it." 

now really, the truth is that i am, by profession, a Journalist, which to me means that i get paid to organize my thoughts that would otherwise be random journal notes into journalism. like journalism with a capital J. and besides, i have my column and if that isn't a naked journal that i get paid for, i don't know what is. 

it occurs to me that this blog is an on line journal. i know my friend the poet christine kluge told me that she uses hers as a kind of website so that editors and such can see her work easily on line and i guess that's purposeful. but so far i don't know how to make that work for me, so this is just a blog, a silly blog, to be taken no more seriously than someone writing in their diary. 

whatever.

long live the internet. and besides, my hands are so stiff now from encroaching arthritis that i can no longer hand write any thing and have to type all the time. Ha ha ha.

farewell to duke

Duke, our big orange tabby, died today. I took him to our vet and had him euthanized. He had a huge tumor growing in his throat that made it in the last few days impossible for him to breathe or drink or eat. Nonetheless, he put up a good fight going into the carrying crate. Duke was a strong willed animal to the end.

We had him for 16 years. I got him the day before Thanksgiving when my son was in first grade. He had been tossed from a moving car that was flying through the parking lot of my gym. He was a young cat, about six months old. He came right over to me when I called him and he lived very happily with us ever since.

Duke was what they call an outdoor cat because he didn't love staying in the house. He was out in all weathers, including blizzards. For years he loved killing things, chipmunks, squirrels, mice, voles, birds. He broke my heart a few times with his murdering and it angered me that he didn't always eat what he killed. But that's a cat for you. With us, he was always a model of affection. He was always very loving and deeply enjoyed being petted. 

I don't think we'll get another cat for awhile. We still have our dogs, Gigi and Basil,  and we have Leo, the Turkish Van cat who appeared at the edge of our woods many years ago. Leo is old, as well, although exactly how old I cannot say. He loved Duke, and undoubtedly will miss him, but I don't think he'd cotton that well now to another feline. 

I asked to have Duke cremated and they'll call me when his ashes are ready. I'll have to find the right place in the yard to bury them. It hasn't hit me yet that Duke is really gone. For years I've said how great it will be to get through a night without having to open or close the front door for him, but I wonder if I'll be able to sleep as I will still be listening for him.

the bedford bob

In my guise as girl reporter, I covered an event at the John Jay Homestead last evening on the topic of slavery. The speaker was Fergus Bordwich, author of "Bound For Canaan," a book about the Underground Railroad, and another, newer book called "Washington: The Making of the American Capital." It was a very entertaining and illuminating lecture and Bordwich is a good speaker, which helps, but I couldn't help be struck by the fact that he was giving this entire spiel to an audience full of white people. Very white people. 

He said that in the 1790's and for decades after, the Hudson Valley, the place where I live, was the largest region of slaveholders in the entire northern part of the newly formed United States. And no wonder, since this is where the farms were that supplied milk and other farm produced goods to New York City. I thought about the old cemeteries and the old illustrious family names and how proud old Bedfordites are to have families that go back so long here. Some of those families, especially the ones who owned acres and acres, must have been slave owners. Gee. 

Then I noticed how so many female heads in the audience looked the same. There is a hair do in Bedford I have grown to refer to as, "The Bedford Bob." It's a chin length cut, no layers, no bangs, wisps, no fringe; usually blond but often that funny, unemphatic shade of gray that blond goes when it's not blond any longer. It would be called Remembrance of Blond if anyone took the trouble to bottle it.  Half the women in the room, maybe more than half, were sporting the 'do. They were also wearing boxy little silk suits in pastel shades, bare legs, and kitten heels, tiny miniature heels that are easy to walk in but add a half inch to one's height. Dressed in white jeans, boots, and a sleeveless chocolate colored silk top from Banana Republic, my flat ironed collar bone grazing hair frizzing in the humidity, you might say I felt just a shade out of place. More like an octoroon, or one of the slaves who must at one time have lived in Bedford. Hopefully if I was a slave in a past life here, at least I was a house slave who got the special privilege of sleeping in the house. 

kick ass ride in the woods today

My son asked me not long ago if a day could go by that i didn't mention something about riding or my horse. the answer is no, actually. today i took a wild, galloping, heart pounding 3 hour ride through the woods and fields and hills and dales and through a couple of deep streams of bedford new york, which is where my horse and I live, and it was breathtaking. We were going so fast that I have to say I did not do my usual bird watching (hawks and other big birds of prey mostly), nor did I comment much about the weather or the deer or any other thing since mostly it was just ride for your life. In a few weeks I'll be doing the Dogwood Ride of Greenwich (known to some as "a private tour of the best back yards of Greenwich") and on Memorial Day weekend, the Bedford Riding Lanes Association Spring Pace, which begins (and ends) at the John Jay Homestead. They ain't for sissies.

A woman on the ride today who keeps her horse in North Salem asked me if it was true that I am the "Carrie Bradshaw" of Bedford. "You should really capitalize on that," she advised, a cig dangling between two fingers of her ungloved hand. You don't see that many women riding sans gloves let alone people smoking on horseback. I liked it. She said a movie is due out on Sex in the City and I said that I thought sex in the suburbs on some essential level was less interesting. But maybe it isn't. Please do if you're reading this, weigh in.

i'm writing a new book!

This is big news. After more than a year hiatus since my last book was published, i have just been green lighted for my next project, a new book about SEX! This one will be called "101 Things You Didn't Know About Sex" and is to be published by Adams Media. This is really exciting because it's gonna be a kick-ass fun read and super informative, too!

If anyone reading this blog has any suggestions, i.e. what do you not know about sex that you would like to know, such as is sex good for your complexion & how many calories are there in semen & is there a Viagra for women & is it okay to have sex when it's "that time of month," or whatever, just ask and i'll put the answer in the book. That's a promise! All reasonable questions considered....and, oh, yes, a few unreasonable ones, as well!

In the meantime I just got back from a whirlwind tour of Oslo, Paris and London. They really do eat reindeer steak in Oslo, and whale, too. Paris has the best oysters and the best chocolate chaud (that's hot chocolate to you, dear) but London, no matter what you eat or drink, absolutely rocks! 

women and horseback riding

a friend of mine has been telling me that her crotch is dead. she says she has no more sex drive. it takes a half hour of self pleasuring for her to reach her climax. who has the time i wrote back. she was discussing this with me on email, hotmail actually. i told her that for a couple of years i had felt much the same way, the reason, i guess, being that i've just had too much  sex in my life and maybe it was time to hang up my holster. Or that my lack of desire was nature's way of informing me that i'm all effed out, that the car has run out of gas, the batteries have gone dead, whatever. don't you love 'whatever'? what an insoucient, annoying word. i wish i had had it at my disposal the better to torture my mother with when i was 15. 

what brought your desire back, my friend said. clearly that was the part of my reply she focused on. 

horseback riding, i told her. trail riding. hunter pacing. it's so stimulating. you have this 1,000 hot thing between your thighs and you're dashing pell mell through the woods and o'er hill and dale and your adrenaline is flowing and you're all jived up. it's very sexual.  

do other women riders talk about this my friend said. 

no, i said. that's verboten. then i wrote LOL and got off. 

musings on matzo

musings on matzo for me always begin like this. a week or two before passover, my husband, known to some as "mr sax," brings home a box of matzo and we begin eating it. he eats it with an imitation butter he strangely loves which frightens me because it comes in a spray bottle. a plastic spray bottle. he adores it. he says his discovery of it has sincerely changed his life. anyway, he sprays his sheets of matzo with his imitation butter and then squeezes honey from a container shaped like a little bear all over it. when he had a beard, matzo crumbs and honey would be all over it. it sounds disgusting but it was a bit sexy, interestingly. 

i like matzo with just about anything on it since i grew up thinking matzo was just the same as melba toast. it was a cracker and that was it. my mother treated it the way other mom's treated wonder bread or peppridge farm; it was just a brand of bread in my house. we ate matzo all year round, not just around passover. we had it for dinner once a week in the form of matzo brei.

Should  i like matzo? probably not. i think it is as bad for me as anything else that i truly like and not just because it's trendy, and really, truly, seriously, i think  i may be sushi'ed out,  a list of exciting and delicious foods i grew up eating including pizza, hot fudge sundaes, zeppoles (that's confectioner sugar dusted fried dough, an Italian delicacy), and White House subs from the shop in Atlantic City where they make the best sub in the world. the bread is the secret but also their signature chopped hot peppers and the way they shred the lettuce and slice the tomatoes so thin. 

But I digress. we're still talking about matzo. the best advice i can offer to anyone who is attending a seder or maybe gentiles who feel they need to bring matzo into their lives because their adored daughter has married a Jewish man and they have to adapt and learn to eat strange stuff is that to orient yourself to the matzo experience, try first eating it covered in chocolate. chocolate covered matzo is amazing.  

spitting about eliot spitzer

In addition to my numerous writing hats, I compose a regular column entitled "View From the Porch" for the Record Review newspaper, the official paper of Bedford, N.Y., the privileged, insanely gorgeous, mostly prosperous portion of Northern Westchester county where  Ralph Lauren, George Soros, Richard Gere, Chevy Chase, and other assorted celebrities - in their own minds and otherwise - live. Following the high profile bust of Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who got nabbed and subsequently resigned for cavorting with a high end prostitute "Kristen," for whom he spent an estimated $80,000, I wrote about it for the newspaper. I said a lot of things in that column, including that I think married men who dally with doxies aren't really cheating on their wives, since paid for sex isn't infidelity as much as it is sport. To be honest, were I Tilda Spitzer, I'd be more ticked about the money than where he put his cock. Also what was that business about him refusing to wear a condom but not wanting to take off his socks? Let me guess. Eliot Spitzer suffers from foot fungus. On the subject of sport, I forgot to mention it in the column, but houses of prostitution in the 19th century were called Sporting Houses. It was a term of endearment to call any oversexed old geezer, "Old Sport." Well. How dare I, one angry letter writer to the paper wrote. Apparently I am the devil, and according to this man, I insult and humiliate good women in Bedford  altogether with my despicable thoughts. 

I'm kind of excited about this. Who knew anyone was reading my words so carefully? And they say newspapers are dying. Pshaw.

On Horseback

Today I rode my pony Buttons for nearly 3 hours in a part of Bedford known as Piney Woods. I was in the company of my two favorite riding partners, the beautiful and strong H., and J. who is petite and elegant. J's  long red hair is the identical shade of the mane of her horse, Dakota. H. was astride Commanche. We own our horses and we love riding together on the dirt roads and in the woods. Several times a week we conspire to leave our work by 1 o'clock to meet at the barn to go riding. 

Around 1:30 we were trotting up Succabone Road. The sun was shining. Two dogs, a lab and a spaniel, barked at us as we went past their house. At Bedford Center Road we made a left turn on to a short piece of trail in the woods that runs parallel to the pavement. Outside some iron gates protecting the entrance to an estate, at a decent break in traffic at a particularly hideous to cross spot, we trotted single file across the road to re-enter the trail and make a mad dash up a steep hill that then twists and winds sideways down into a ravine before becoming a long straight flat stretch surrounded on both sides by trees, ideal for a canter. Next we loped across a long expanse of green lawn set beside a swimming pool and a fenced in property where a barking golden retriever stood guard, hair up, tail straight as a flag, unfriendly.

We laughed at the dog (what is a dog to a horse who can kick a dog into silence?) and proceeded at a walk down a steep gully, me saying, "easy, easy," to Buttons who forged straight ahead. I love my little pony. He is nimble and brave. Unfazed by cars, trucks, heavy earth moving equipment, balloons or grates in the pavement, he moves along, his little gray and white and black ears pricked forward. Very curious about everything Buttons is. He listens to birds calling to each other in the woods. He looks at the deer. On a ride we took alone last autumn in Buxton Gorge, we came upon a buck and a doe the buck was most interested in. Buttons and I stood stock still for a minute, as did the deer.  We took each other's measure. Aware that bucks in rut are prone to highly assertive and aggressive behavior, I encouraged Buttons to move along, which we did, quietly. 

J. and H. and I circumvented the jumping bowl to take a side trail over to the area adjacent to Shannon Farm, a genteel old equestrian facility directly behind Bedford Village. The views are amazing. We trotted along Clinton Road and turned into the preserve and navigated the woods and trails until we got to Shannon. On the trail just outside Shannon, we encountered two rather heavyset women riding horses. One of the horses was rearing. In addition to her utterly correct English riding gear, its rider had attached a large, supplemental sun brim  to her riding helmet which J. remarked made the woman look a bit like a bee keeper. We wondered was it the hat scaring the horse.

On the way home, we galloped through the jumping bowl and J. and I dared to take some jumps. Buttons was ecstatic. At the barn I hand fed him carrots and half an apple saved over from my lunch. It feels very spoiled and nearly wicked to sneak off this way on a Wed afternoon.

 

Dawn of a new era

This is the dawn of a new era. me, who is afraid of her own website, has finally become hip to blogspot. how i found out about blogspot is because my friend the internationally recognized poet, Christine Boyka Kluge, who is also a self described website clod, or cloddess since Chris is in my humble opinion, a kind of goddess, now has a blogspot. She encouraged me to start one too.