Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Playwright, screenwriter, producer, and founder/CEO of Providence Productions, Elizabeth Hemmerdinger began her career in theater and film as a playwright, winning the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Goldberg Prize for "We Can Do It!", which she is now adapting as a musical. Her play "Squall" was the winner of the U.S. West Theatre Festival. That and two other plays, "Fine Family" and "The National Treasure," have been produced from the Williamstown Theater Festival to Europe. Her growing cycle of 10-minute Rage Plays are produced around the country. Hemmerdinger is the Executive Producer of The Real Rosie the Riveter Project, a growing collection of filmed oral histories of the women who took the place of men on the production line during World War II. The collection is housed at NYU’s Tamiment Labor Archive at the Bobst Libraries. A tireless advocate for women, Hemmerdinger has written for "Ms. Magazine," and is a member of the Board of Directors of Women’s Voices for Change and a regular contributor to its website. She is a founding board member of Dancing Dreams, which teaches a unique collaboration between high school girls and children with severe physical disabilities.
Film & Television · News

Something Wonderful Is Happening in Michigan Tonight

By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger
My heart goes out to Michigan. A state that has, over time, contributed in so many major ways to enhancing the American Dream, is in a state of financial disarray that’s hard to appreciate here in New York City on a glorious spring day. We were in Detroit recently and saw first-hand how the downtown, except on the night of…
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Lifestyle

Grambo Had a Great Day

By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger
By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger I took my granddaughter, 5 weeks short of 5 years, to Central Park yesterday afternoon.  She’s the one who gave me my nickname.   “Rocks, Grambo!  Can I climb them?” I checked the soles of her shiny Mary Janes.  Yes, indeed, rubber soles.  Do you remember that the man in the shoe store used to score your new…
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News

Web Watch: Laughing Through the Financial “Troubles”

By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger
The Daily Show With Jon StewartM – Th 11p / 10c CNBC Gives Financial Advice Daily Show Full Episodes Important Things With Demetri Martin Political Humor Joke of the Day NBC’s Brian Williams has referred to the 2008-2009 financial reckoning as “The Troubles,” the term once used across the pond for the seemingly endless wars over Northern Ireland (a struggle…
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Money & Careers

Change in the work force – and for all of us.

By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger
by Elizabeth Hemmerdinger The road to economic recovery is going to be rocky – and apparently built mostly by men.   Linda R. Hirshman, author of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, brings something pretty scary to our attention in last week’s op-ed piece “Where Are the New Jobs for Women?”  “The bulk of the stimulus program…
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Books

Sarah Vowell Has the Gift

By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger
By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Sarah Vowell, author of “The Wordy Shipmates,” who I’d actually never heard of until I saw her on David Letterman’s show one recent night, now has a place of honor in my heart.  Everybody who can help me laugh out loud makes the cut.   Anybody who can make me do that while talking about the Puritans… well,…
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Arts & Culture · Books · News

Thanksgiving then, and even before then, and now

By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger
By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger I’ve always thrown myself into Thanksgiving. You can see in the photo below, from my turn as a Pilgrim in the 1956 sixth grade pageant at Hunter College Elementary School in New York City. Long, long ago. Might as well have been the first Thanksgiving ever. As a playwright I can tell you, I’ve got the lead…
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News

Web Watch: Michael Lewis, Meredith Whitney, and the End of the World As We Know it

By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger
By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger What really started the world-wide financial nuclear reaction?  There’s been no loud explosion, no visible flames, no pore-clogging airborne toxins, but Michael Lewis, the documentarian of Wall Street’s excesses of the ‘80’s in his 1990 book Liar’s Poker, offers us an explanation for the recent financial bloodbath. The End of the Wall Street Boom,  on Portfolio.com, is…
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News

Anyone Know Where They Put the Honor Code?

By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger
By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger An editorial from the New York Times a few weeks ago, something that seemed so obvious to me as to require no further thought whatsoever, has in fact, caused me to dwell rather obsessively. In “Digging Out Roots of Cheating in High School,” Maura J. Casey reports that cheating in schools has been rising at an alarming…
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Books

Book Tease: Long Walks into John Le Carre’s Dark World

By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger
By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger  Saturday is the beginning of the weekend, and what with the world being simply way to much for us to sort out at the end of five days in a financial House of Horrors, this is just the time to cuddle up with a good book. And I’ve got a doozie: John Le Carre’s A Most Wanted…
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Money & Careers

Understanding Financial Markets: From Fear to Fluency with Viv’s Vocabulary

By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger
By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger I don’t know about you, but I feel the need to follow this dreadful financial crisis almost perpetually.  Until a couple of weeks ago, I was an innocent, only occasionally scanning the headlines  and topic sentences of media coverage about business.  After all, I’m an Arts-Person, so I was drawn to the financial world pretty much only…
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Politics

Vice Presidential Choices

By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger
Palin as a reformer.  Give me a break!  The old boy sits there saying, "she’s going to sweep out the old boys’ network."  Don’t you get it? Watch your back, John.  He talks about an across-the-board spending freeze and in this segment says Palin will look after special needs children.  Obama points out that a spending freeze obviates help for…
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Politics

Debating tactics

By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger
I so yearn for these men to be statesmanlike, to be viewing our plight from 30,000 feet, and not in the trenches.  Obama comes closest here by saying, not for the first time, "Making sure we disagree without being disagreeable."  And yet, McCain insists on going back to Ayers, giving Obama the chance to discuss the milieu in which he…
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Politics

Plumbing and facts

By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger
We’ve heard differences in the how the two men see Joe the Plumber.  Obama says Joe can afford to pay taxes since he intends to earn more than $250,000. a year.  McCain says why should the guy pay any tax?  Why should we spread the wealth around?  Obama says we should encourage small business, help them grow; and more than…
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