After 36 years, I am taking a year off! During my digital detox, I look forward to some unstructured analog time to pursue other interests. I will continue to work for mid-term victories, as I hope you will. Please note that I will not be responding to any social media messengering, emails, website or booking inquiries and tweets during this time. Thank you for your support and good wishes. A healthy, productive, victorious 2018 to you!
Not to go all Nell deGrasse Tyson on you, but because of the tilt of the sun in its orbit, Dec 21st is the longest night. It’s also the shortest day, unless you are waiting for the L-Train. Though we pick up just one minute a day for the next seventeen days, I begin almost immediately to insist to anyone who will listen that it is lighter longer.
The world judders on its axis of Medieval; teeters toward some dank Dark Age. This Winter Solstice, get back to your ancestry dot com pagan roots, light a bonfire, and whoop it up. Next day, after you sober up, sign up to work in the Midterm elections. Insist that we turn toward the light.
Presumably you’ve re-friended some folks since last year’s dinner/shiva. This year over pumpkin pie, bring up the Masterpiece Cakeshop Case. In 2012 the owner refused to sell a wedding cake to a same sex couple. The Supreme Court will hear the case on December 5th.
Talking point: it’s not about religious freedom. It’s about privileging Christian religion over the law of the land. The law says the 11.20.17Cakeshop is free to sell anything it wants. It is not free to decide whom to sell it to.
For a post-desert digestive, cue up Donna Summer and her eight and a half minute disco-fied version of MacArthur Park. Scream along with Donna: “Someone left the rainbow cake out in the rain. I don’t think that I can take it, cause it took so long to bake it, and I’ll never have that recipe again.”
Good news: we do actually have a recipe. We saw it in this year’s election. Discuss electoralizing the resistance on your I-can’t-believe-I-ate-the-whole-thing after dinner walk. Next Thanksgiving, we’re serving up the mid-terms!
My new show, KNOCK! KNOCK! WHO’S THERE? ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE is going to be a blast. And you can be part of it.
Help me write some knock-knock jokes for the show. You be fully compensated: 10% of the scientifically proven health benefits of laughter.
Historically knock-knock jokes were huge – if you’ll pardon the expression – during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The craze intensified after the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt whom people either loved or hated fiercely. There were knock-knock contests, strangers told them to each other on the street, knock-knock shows on Broadway, orchestras performed them, merchants and political campaigns used them to sell their wares. Read More
To quote Emily Dickinson: “Hope” is the thing with feathers.
If hope is the thing with feathers, I hope it’s not a Canada goose.
This winter Manhattan looks as if it’s been invaded by some rogue unit of the Royal Canadian Mounties. I think they come in peace. They wear fur-lined hooded puffer parkas of varying lengths and colors all with a distinctive blue, red and white insignia of Canada geese.
In 2016, without apparent hint of irony, I called my summer show, “Wake-Up Call”. Posing during selfie-sessions, fans would side-mouth to me, “You’re brilliant.” I would deflect, “It’s just because we agree.” The Rejection Election suggests I should have called the show “Clueless”.
Hair Trump’s ‘election’ is the triumph of Totalitarian Capitalism: a borderless, economic system of genocide and slavery that is the foundation of our country. He is less a president, more a trigger. Read More
I feel like I’m writing a hostage note to be smuggled out from a secure undisclosed location deep in Facebookistan. Whisper as you read.
I’m fine. Which is a total lie but lies are all the rage. The day after the coup was my birthday, as you know, because I kept endlessly yapping about it. I didn’t get what I wanted. C’est la guerre.
The next few days were a blur. I had to rewrite my “It’s So Great to Have a Woman President!” show. My new show is called, “Let’s Get Together and Break Things”.
Then I emceed a two-day conference on democracy. We hid the sharp knives at mealtimes. After the two day Shiva, I went with my dear partner to visit her family in Texas, an open carry state.
We are back in New York City. I am by turns calm, wild, determined and rageful. It comes out in odd ways. I just put a pan away in an unnecessarily violent way.
The coup has been very clarifying. In the days to come our path of resistance will become clear. This old white lesbian is in no mood for appeasement with white supremacists.
Have a lovely Thanksgiving. I am thankful for all my family and friends. Bless all your sweetness. I thank you all for fighting the good fight. I especially thank Hillary Clinton. When I can’t sleep at 3am, I think of her. Maybe she’s up padding around her house, waiting for the first light. Battling the coulda shouldas. I hope she’s sleeping. Rest, my sister. We’re awake. We got this.
Thank you so much for your birthday wishes/condolences on Wednesday.
I have been trying to check in, see how you’re doing. That’s what friends do. I have made several video blogs but at this very moment my vlog machine is not communicating with the Youtube. The malfunction comes at thee worst moment. I blame it on that Giant Talking Yam.
We won the most votes.
Get some rest. Take care of each other. Get together with family and friends. Get more friends not your age or skin color. Do your stages of grieving.
But acceptance is unacceptable.
Send a thank you note to Hillary.
On we go to the midterms.
Stay nasty,
Kate
I know. I know. I promised ‘Podcast coming soon!’
I totally love that picture of me in the royal blue sport coat and tie with the old-fashioned microphone on the desk. It should spur me on to doing a podcast.
I know you’re up early in the morning checking to see if overnight maybe Santa has left a podcast. As promised. Hint, hint, nudge, nudge.
I don’t know when or why the world went podcast. All I know is I wanted to be part of it. I heard me reading some of my favorite columns to you. Or maybe solving a back-logged murder. Or just hanging with Michele Obama out in my garage podcast studio. Girl chatting, what not.
Well who knew you needed lessons and maybe some equipment more sophisticated than an IPhone4? And then came the sludgy summery humidity, and the conventions and the dog ate my humor, I mean homework and no podcast.
I’m writing this because I couldn’t stand the blank space where the announcement of my latest podcast should be. It’s like a seat-filler at a Republican Convention. You deserve better. If I had a cat, I’d put a picture of it there. I can’t get a cat because my wi-fi hotspot is allergic and cats scare me. For those of you who have read this far, thank you. Podcast coming soon. Also world peace.
I am not a woowoo woman much to the annoyance of many of my seeker friends. But even I will say there was some harmonic convergence, some confluence of vortexes, some unifying something, some hope that happened this week.
A woman, Hillary Clinton, wins her party’s nomination to run for president. Her acceptance speech begins with a call-back to the days of Seneca Falls, women’s rights and women’s vote. A woman in the video actually says ‘partriarchy’ and the roof doesn’t fall in.
Donald Trump, Patriarchy’s Exhibit A, telepromptered presidentially from yet another gilded dining hall in one of his Golf Resorts. He goes off the rails when he can’t resist a peepee joke.
The GOP that made Kim Il Trump possible is said to be dividing. Absolutely no woo woo there. Don’t believe a word of it. They’re zombies. They’ll be back.
Then President Obama gives Hillary his I’m-With-Her endorsement and gleefully chomps at the bit to get on the campaign trail to crush Trump like a bug.
Elizabeth Warren goes all in with her too and becomes Hillary Clinton’s Anger Translator. Warren also praises Bernie Sander’s primary campaign for making the party and all of us better. I feel chastened.
All week videos play of Muhammad Ali speaking his mind, living his conscientious objecting principles, and his Muslim identity. Ali looming over a fallen boxer, “Say my name. Say my name”.
And all the while, the Stanford rape case. The woman, who is not named, names the actual details of a rape, her rape – the words vagina, anus, finger, blood. Rape’s long effects are said and discussed for days in all media. The 6 month sentence, the 20 minutes of action, the Stanford patriarch and his son.
What a week. From name-calling, to naming and claiming. More maniacal national mood swings are in store for us, but this was an extraordinary week.
