In her traditional white satin wedding gown, Ann Belkov made a stately entrance into the wedding hall. But when she saw her guests, she threw her arms out and cried, “AT LAST!” For, at 75, she was a first-time bride.
“I wasn't sure I had something that someone would want to listen to," Grace Haggerty says, "but that fear subsided, and I decided that whether or not someone liked it or someone didn’t like it, I had to do this for myself."
In Dr. Schwartz’s bereavement group for Chinese men, “They talk about sports—sports is a lifesaver. They talk about playing mahjongg. But eventually someone will ask, ‘How do you make the rice for one person?’ Another will say, ‘The loneliest time is before I go to sleep at night, and do you sleep in the middle of the bed?’ Supposedly they don’t like to talk about their feelings, but they do, they do.”
Sheehy’s memoir is the tale of a tempestuous romance; a compelling look into the first stirrings of female revolt in the 1960s and ’70s; and the story of a reporter who throws herself into danger so persistently that her book is clearly the blueprint for a screenplay.
Since some domestic abusers vengefully track down their escaped partners, Second Chance Employment Services works with the Department of Justice to “change anything that needs to be changed to make a woman untraceable," the agency's founder says. "We had a woman who had to change her name and Social Security number three times.”
This is the tale of a tutor (one of 11,000 in the Reading Partners program) who relishes the chance to help a child discover the transporting pleasure that reading can provide.
"At the Flea we say that we want to go places artistically that you might not feel comfortable going," says Carol Ostrow, the theater's producing director. "Our work can be very transgressive and in your face. We exist on a playing field where we want to get in front of you.”
This, I guessed, was a small band of activists who had grit and optimism, given that they’re fighting so massive an opponent—the entrenched, politically powerful coal industry. I found myself wondering, “Who ARE those guys?”
“These are David and Goliath stories," Clara Bingham acknowledges. "I like to write about whistle-blowers and people who put their lives on the line to fight corruption.”
What IS musical plagiarism? Is a particular number of notes, strung in a certain order, the giveaway? Sandy Wilbur, forensic musicologist, says no; it’s more complicated than that.
Jerolyn and her fellow researchers tease out the details of the ancient Minoans’ domestic life through piecing together shattered objects, chemical analysis, experiments (like cooking demonstrations), and informed speculation. "We put these deposits together very slowly, very meticulously, to form a story about an archaeological deposit that’s been excavated," she tells us.
When I was growing up, the preacher, the principal, the politician, the police officer, the radio announcer, the TV anchor—some might be mere tenors, rather than basses, but none was ever a soprano.
“It has taken a couple of generations for the belief in women’s competence to really sink in,” notes producer Elizabeth Hemmerdinger. “Women of my generation have it . . . women in their sixties. But younger women, the 35-year-olds, they’re absolutely certain. 'Fighter pilot?' they’ll say. 'No problem!'"
The Transition Network is a community of professional women 50 and up, and therefore each member is going through a different kind of “what’s next?” transition: children leaving home; elderly parents coming back; pondering the risks of changing careers; retirement; being widowed; being newly remarried; navigating the single life as a mature woman. TTN provides intellectual stimulation, entertainment, and support to women going through these transitions.
Pleasure has been Ann’s business since 1980, when she came up with the idea of a floating swimming pool. “The joy on the faces on the kids, both in Brooklyn and particularly in the Bronx . . . " she says “. . . except for my four children, and marrying my husband, 'The Floating Pool Lady' is the best thing that could have happened to me.”