Facebook Confetti
Bits and pieces, crimes and misdemeanors, uppers and downers.
Muscle Memory
My husband and I have gone back to taking ballroom lessons. The first time we were 20 years younger. Cassie takes them with us, too. It’s pretty much the only time all three of us do something together, so it’s precious.
I have problems walking around the block, but something gets released when you dance—especially if you have muscle memory from the before times—that’s kind of amazing. Yes, I have to take breaks to baby my injured back. But my hips become sexy Susan again and forget I’m 79.
I’m not into doing surgical stuff or Botox to look younger (I’m afraid of needles in the face, and I also don’t want to look in the mirror and not see myself there.) For me, the most depressing thing about aging has been the diminished mobility. What I discovered taking up dance again is that while there are indisputable changes and limitations, for me confidence plays a big role. Fear of falling, fear of hurting my back more, embarrassment to not be able to keep up with others. And all that makes me “feel” my body in a clenched and watchful way, always prepared for something bad.
Dancing, for me, alters that mind/body connection tremendously. My mind lets go of its grip on my body, and I rediscover how much flow and sass is still in there. Latin works best for me, with my low center of gravity and generally sensual nature. My gorgeous goyishe guy Edward, who is tall and slim, struggles letting go with Latin but gets released by swing, which brings back his younger days. He’s 86, so his era (as well as his cultural upbringing) is different from mine. Cassie, being 27, of mixed race and cultures, and astoundingly strong and agile—not to mention having an ADHD brain that absorbs everything—is great at all of it.
For more of my reflections on the mind/body connection, see:
What Do You Mean, “Finally”?
The mainstream media talks as though you can blame all the incoherence, ravings, disconnected babble and lack of control on the fact that he’s about to turn 80.
In fact, the guy has been cognitively (and other ways) unfit for the job he holds for a very, very long time. I’ve been keeping track, as I followed all his rantings outside the courtrooms of his trials, all his “debates,” all his so-called “press conferences,” etc.
Where has the media been all these years?
Recall that first “debate” with President Biden, which sent the press into full-throttle warrior-mode about Biden’s “age problem” and set off a crisis within the Democratic Party that ended with Biden’s leaving the race. Donald Trump, while more “robust,” answered questions with stream-of-nonsense irrelevancies; his performance was a bunch of deflections, lies, and often incomprehensible babble that should have been torn apart sentence by sentence.
Instead, the commentators let the incoherences, non sequiturs, and avalanche of nonsense slide, and gave him decent “grades”for his performance.
They’ve been normalizing Trump for a long, long time. And now that he’s falling asleep at meetings and has bruises on his hands—hardly the gravest evidence of his lack of fitness (if he wasn’t up all night tweeting madman streams he’d probably be more alert during the day)—they can blame it on aging. If it’s all about aging, you see, they are off the hook for not calling it out years ago, when he wasn’t falling asleep and his ankles weren’t swollen, and he had elections ahead of him, providing just a modicum of discipline.
He’s been released from caring about votes for himself now, and can indulge in his most grandiose fantasies and ambitions. Much more concerning than the bruises on his hands or his snoozes.
I see the aging issue is a convenient evasion by the media of their failures in covering Trump responsibly from the very beginning.
I Wear My Sunglasses at Night
I don’t like my Facebook profile pic, so I foraged thru my recent photos for a new one. I decided to go like my Anne Boleyn book cover (UK hardback.) Believe it or not, some British historians accused me of trampling on an iconic portrait and refused to blurb the book! Not all of them were as stuffy (thank you, Suzanne Lipscomb!) but to play it safe, the press changed the cover for the paperback edition. Cheeky Anne’s revenge: Copies of the hardback are now prized rarities, selling for $100 plus.
(During May, I always repost pieces in commemoration of Anne:
Jewish Joke
Here’s an old Jewish joke that’s a great metaphor for what Trump has been doing tearing up Obama’s deal, making war on Iran…and then expecting us to applaud when he gets us back where we started—if even that happens. It’s all sleight-of-hand, shell game…whatever you want to call it. But because Trump isn’t a wise old rabbi (or a wise anything) he may never be able to undo what he’s done and the joke will be on him. Unfortunately, we also seem unable to throw him out of the house that we put him in.
A poor man goes to the rabbi and cries, “Rabbi, my life is miserable! I live in a tiny, one-room house with my wife, our six kids, and my mother-in-law. It’s so crowded and noisy that we’re all going crazy. What should I do?”Step 1: The rabbi nods and asks, “Do you have any animals? A goat, maybe?” The man says yes. The rabbi tells him, “Go home and bring the goat inside to live in the house with you.” The man thinks this is silly, but he trusts the rabbi.
A few days later, the man returns, even more distraught. “Rabbi, it’s a nightmare!” he cries. “The goat is chewing the furniture, pooping on the floor, and there’s absolutely no room!” The rabbi replies, “Go home, and bring your cow into the house as well.”
The man obeys, and things get incredibly chaotic. The house is like a barn, animals are running wild, and the family is at their breaking point. Finally, the man goes back to the rabbi, begging for relief. The rabbi gently tells him, “Go home, and take all the animals back outside.” The man does as he’s told, and as soon as the animals are out of the house, he returns to the rabbi, beaming with joy: “Rabbi, it’s a miracle! The house is so quiet, and we have so much room! Life is wonderful.”
Is Anorexia Becoming Obsolete?
It’s a long time since I’ve written about the topic that I’m actually best known for. There was enough said, by myself and others. But that was in the pre-Ozempic days, when, however you “theorized” it (whether sociological, psychological, genetic, familial or etc.) it was generally recognized that one could go too far. The skin-and-bones extreme, unless you were a runway model, was considered a consequence of disorder not a normative aspiration.
Ozempic has important uses, and there are moments when I’ve been tempted myself to give a boost to my efforts to get rid of 20 lbs of post-menopausal weight. But what’s scary about how Ozempic has changed things is that now both social and mainstream media are gushing over how celebrities have “wowed” and “dazzled” as they walk the red carpet, showing off bodies—especially arms—that are without flesh or muscle. And the celebs can honestly say “I don’t have an eating disorder” because they don’t—not in any of the ways we used to understand it.
It’s a whole new stage in what Kim Chernin once called “the tyranny of slenderness.” Slenderness is no longer the cultural ideal. Emaciation is. And apparently, particularly among older actresses.
When I was a body theorists, one of my standard public lectures used to focus on all the ways in which ads and media commentary and new visual norms encourage us toward excess, toward not knowing when to stop, toward going over the line of “balance”—because when we are in balance, we don’t fuel consumer culture the way “it” needs us to. Consumer capitalism wants us binging and “purging”; there’s money to be made from both poor people’s over-consumption of unhealthy but affordable food. And there money to be made from wealthier people’s pursuit of youth and (what gets sold as) “perfection.” “Ideal” bodies are “never just pictures,” I argued. They are part of the machinery of consumerism. And so Ozempic and its progeny have drifted from medication for diabetes and the dangerously obese into the “I want to look like that” category.
People may have a “right” to do what they want to their own bodies. But we’re fooling ourselves if we think this is personal preference.
P.S. I shouldn’t have to say this, but misunderstanding of issues concerning dieting, body image, etc. is common, so:
I am not criticizing people who are genetically very thin and have trouble keeping weight on. Or people who are emaciated from involuntary starvation. Or people who use Ozempic and other meds to treat extreme obesity, diabetes, or medical conditions of other sorts. Actually, I’m not criticizing PEOPLE at all. I’m describing a culture gone haywire.
Bergdorf’s Dressing Room
Just to keep Trump’s history of sexual abuse fresh in your mind as he tries to get back at E. Jean Carroll for speaking truth:
In 2019, columnist E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. She describes the attack in her excellent book, quoting from the trial transcript:
A. His head was beside me, breathing. First, he put his mouth against me.
Q. Do you mean he kissed you?
A. Yes.
Q. Did you kiss him back?
A. No. I didn’t consider it a kiss. It was such— it was a shocking thing for him to suddenly put his mouth against mine. I thought what? What? What? No.
Q. Were you afraid while this was happening?
A. I was in-this is going to sound strange. I was too frightened to think if I was afraid or not. I was stamping. My whole reason for being alive in that moment was to get out of that room…
…I was stamping and trying to wiggle out from under him. But he had pulled down my tights and his hand went-his fingers went into my vagina, which was extremely painful, extremely painful. It was a horrible feeling because he curved, he put his hand inside of me and curved his finger. As I’m sitting here today,I can still feel it. It was—
Q. Then what happened?
A. Then he inserted his penis.
Q: What did you do in that moment?
A. I tried—
Q. Do you need a moment, Ms. Carroll?
[I did not need a moment. I have had enough moments.]
A. You asked me what I did in that moment? I always think back to why I walked in there to get myself in that situation, but I’m proud to say I got out. I got my knee up. I got my knee up and pushed him back.
Q. You said you got your knee up. What happened next?
A. Once I could get my knee up, I could get him to back off. I could actually move his body. I was quite strong. I was an athlete. I could push him back by putting that knee up.
Q. What did you do after you were able to push him off?
A. I exited the room, and I got out of the store as quickly as I could.
Q. I think you were touching on this Ms. Carroll, but sitting here today, how do you feel about your decision to go into that dressing room?
A. It was stupid. I know people have been through a lot worse than this, but it—it left me. It left me unable to ever have a romantic life again.
(From Not My Type: One Woman Vs. A President)
Excerpted from:
Keep Trashing “Boomers” and You’ll Get More Graham Platners
The branding of the Democrats currently in office as aging, impotent, and cowardly has set us up to welcome young, white male saviors riding in to save the party from defeat. Some of them are fine. Others, not so much. It doesn’t matter if listening to them speak, you hear the bully just beneath the surface of the well-packaged “charisma.” (“Authenticity” can be packaged too.) It doesn’t matter if they have a history of sexism or anti-Semitism. It doesn’t matter if they knock women, even women of color, out of the running. Nazi tattoos? Gross sexual conduct? It seems we’ve gone beyond caring about such things in a candidate’s history. The only disqualification, it seems, is if you are of “boomer” generation.
One day this past week, one of those “boomer-blaming” posts—written by a Bernie Sanders enthusiast—went over the edge with me:
Being wished dead was a little extra for me. So—uncharacteristic of me, I rarely tell people off on my FB page—I responded:
I actually found much of my generation, when we were the “young” ones, to be just as infuriating, and for much the same reasons. And I agree that it’s time for a new generation to step up and step in. But there’s a huge price to be paid when vital older Dems who continue to contribute and who would have an excellent chance of winning their elections with a little solidarity from young “progressives” get primaried by problematic candidates just because the younger ones bring “fresh air” into the room. It’s ironic, too, because the same people lumping “boomers” into one decrepit, useless lot are Bernie worshippers!! Go figure.
My response was strong, I admit, but my ending plea was for coalition. Stepping up is all to the good. But stepping on a whole generation isn’t, and that’s the attitude I recoil from, not just because I’m a part of that generation (that smarts, but so what) but because I see it as harmful for the Democrat’s chances of taking back the country. The damage done by “progressives” in 2016 and 2024 was significant—I’ve written extensively about it—and I see signs of the same happening again in 2026 and 2028.
The Demonization of “Israel”
Whether or not Netanyahu’s war fits some definition of genocide is a debate for scholars. But it’s clear that the vast numbers of people chanting and spewing Israel-hate on social media aren’t interested in those debates. They just want to lob the most inflammatory accusation available to them. For them, “genocide” simply means Israel is the embodiment of evil, and of a particularly racist variety—which immediately signals those who imagine themselves anti-racist to jump on the bandwagon.
Once you’re up there, riding along with others “on the right side of history” there’s no need to think any more about it, you’ve got your talking points. You aren’t obliged to consider opposing arguments or concerns. We who think differently are “genocide-enablers,” you see, and that’s almost as bad as those committing genocide:
“You must not look at the polls that show that the overwhelming majority of Israelis supported either the genocide or ethnic cleansing. You also must not have read any Zionist history showing how from the get go the only way to create an ethno nationalist Jewish state would be to erase the indigenous Palestinians. But more likely you’re just a disgusting apologist for the most barbaric murderous state of this generation. 🇵🇸” (a FB comment on my page)
To call this “disinformation” is generous. And I didn’t have to troll the pages of Facebook to find it. It’s all over social media. It’s staggering.
Setting aside the question of whether any genocide or “ethnic cleansing” is happening, notice no mention of “Netanyahu” or “Israel’s right wing” or “the current Israeli government.” We seem to have no problem distinguishing between our current administration and the diverse, politically divided country we live in. But when it comes to the actions of the Netanyahu administration, the people of Israel get glommed into one evil entity. You hardly ever even hear Netanyahu’s name any more, it’s just “Israel” and “the Israelis”—as though there’s some kind of homogeneous, national (and possibly religious/ethnic) disposition to blame. If it was any country other than Israel, “the left” would call this racist thinking.
That conflation was sharply exposed when Mamdani refused to walk in the “Israel Day” parade. He claimed it was a protest against the Israeli “government.” But although there were some members of the Israeli right-wing in the parade, the celebration—which started in 1964–far predates the current administration, and—like other nationality parades—celebrates heritage, identity, and cultural contribution not the actions and ideology of whatever government happens to be in power. Mamdani has attended multiple parades celebrating other nationalities, including Pakistan and China, without treating those events as endorsements of their governments. But Israel? That’s a special case for him, and whether or not he provided for the safety of these particular marchers, his refusal to lock arms with so many Jewish people who love and identify with the nation—the nation, not the government—that he has branded as a singularly Evil Empire has certainly not made life safer for us.
Back at the beginning of the current tsunami of anti-Israel fervor—which invaded “the left” while the blood of October 7 was still being wiped from the homes of the raped, tortured, and slaughtered, I posted this:
The post seemed pretty innocuous to me at the time. How could anyone object to these reasonable recommendations?
I was naive. I was hopeful. No more.
(I’ve written several posts specifically about media coverage of Israel/Hamas. In this 2025 post, however, I get more personal:
TV Quick Takes
1. “Rivals” (two seasons): Only the British could pull of this vastly entertaining combo of soap opera, slapstick, hunky men, gross sexual misconduct, and David Tenant as the Platonic form of wicked, slimy, skin-crawlingly delicious.
3. “Margot’s Got Money Troubles”: Elle Fanning is charming and innocent and tender (watch her face as she diapers her baby as the clueless social services guy, who doesn’t recognize diaper rash, looks on), and there are few cliches in this warm, non-judgy series.
4. “Criminal Record” (two seasons) Cush Jumbo and Peter Capaldi—need I say more?—form an unlikely, ambiguous, strange and utterly compelling pair of cops with very different ideas of what justice involves. Led me to re-watch “The Devil’s Hour”—also with Capaldi—which was as engrossing as it was the first time around.
5. “The Tower” (2 seasons) In my opinion, among the strongest British procedurals—right up there with “Unforgotten,” “Happy Valley” and “The Fall” (except somehow you might not have heard of it, as I hadn’t); complex characters, social issues intrinsic and non-hammered at, slowly unwinding plot that stitches the first two seasons together seamlessly.
6. “The Split” (two full seasons, one mini-season of two episodes) I loved the first two seasons and was impatient for the third to get to American tv, but wow what a let-down; bland and smarmy, and I’m still wondering why they even made it. Enjoy the first two if you haven’t yet, skip the third.
Rewatching The Bureau and enjoying it more the second time, perhaps because we are now understanding all the machinations more.
I'm 76 and my wife and I have been doing ballroom for about five years. It's a major part of our lives now. Unfortunately she's had a foot injury recently and we're not sure it will heal enough to keep dancing. I'm like your husband; love the smooth dances, waltz and foxtrot. I encourage all your readers to get out on the dance floor.