On Dads...and packing

They say that men have a hard time trying to figure out the female "mind." Well, truth be told, I've always spent a lot of time trying to figure out how the male brain works and why we have such differences. I'd like to say that I have discovered there is something men possess that women simply do not. Men are born with a packing gene. Let's call it the "Tetrus" gene, for in the game of Tetrus, each precise move determines the next and any single misplacement will cause instant failure. Dexterity is also a factor. After seeing my son be able to create a flying Lego invention of his own design, pretty much right after coming out of the womb, I can say with certainty: men are dexterous beings who know how to pack. Females simply do not possess this packing gene.

Every summer,  as part of the ritual of our yearly road and ferry trip to Martha's Vineyard, I recall my Dad getting us all up early. We needed to bring our suitcases downstairs so he could pack the old station wagon properly. You know those 1970s wagons - the size of a small boat? Every inch was carefully planned and calculated for maximum efficiency, including the open space left in the "way back" where my best friend Ellen and I would be cosseted among the suitcases, coolers, tennis gear and other paraphernalia for the six hour drive to the Cape.

Married now to an even more skillful packer than my Dad, I watch in awe as my husband methodically places every box, bag and chip into our Jetta in the Costco parking lot once a month. I am amazed at his skill placing suitcases in our Mini with impossible precision. He does it with such aplomb.

He has the gene. I certainly do not.

So, in anticipation and celebration of Father's Day coming up, I would like to say thank you to all those men who have packed me off to places unknown, adventures to conquer, supermarkets to home. My father, my husband, boyfriends, supermarket clerks, FedEx guys, my packer-in-training sons. Thank you all and Happy Father's Day!

Globe-trotting Nomads

         Re-connecting with so many high school friends following the Prep School Scandal article (see last two blog entries), I've been asked a couple of times how I was doing, what I was up to and what I've done since high school. 

         In a nutshell: I am an Urban Nomad. 

         My family and I are well and living in LA, where we've been for the past six years. My journey has been a crooked and globe-trotting one. I went from NY to Budapest to Miami, Mexico and Argentina, back to NY (upstate) and then onto Los Angeles. We should throw in a little bit of Greece there too, as my husband is from Athens and all his family is still there.

         Married 10 years ago, now I am surrounded by more male energy than I could even have imagined in high school. My stepson who just turned 24 is thankfully out of the house now and employed (yeah!), son 9 is in elementary school, husband Nick is also a peripatetic sort and two dogs (brother and sister) that go wherever we go.

         My career has been pretty successful in media and television, from beginning as a speechwriter for politicians back in the 80s to writing and producing music videos, behind-the-scenes videos, documentaries, on air promotions and lots of other things for so many I've lost count! 

         During the last decade my career took a more executive turn until the crash of 2009, when I, along with 200 others at our network, were "downsized." Spend a lot of time as community activist, particularly for education and kids and am turning that into something full-time, along with writing, which is my true passion.

         Have written a children's series, many screenplays, commercials, am working on a fact-based novel about the lives of two extraordinary families in the lower east side following them through all of last century…along with a kind of memoir, which funny enough, deals with a bunch of things that occurred during those HM days.

That's it in a nutshell…

Oh and we are moving to Miami over the summer!

The Horace Mann Community

    The communications between and among alumni of the Horace Mann School, following the release of Sunday's New York Times story on prep-school predators, has been remarkable. The astounding outpouring is indicative of the motto we all learned there: "Great is the truth and it prevails..." even if it takes awhile to come to light. Numbering in the thousands, the comments on the paper's site, among Facebook friends and in emails between fellow classmates, the notes of outrage,  emotional conflict, sadness, anger and support  point most interestingly to the strength of the community itself. 

    "Once an HMer, always an HMer" some say. We look out for each other. We have a common ground, a shared history that runs deep.. One of my high school friends came to this apt conclusion: we are the stewards of the school. It is up to us, as alumni, as stewards,  to help turn tragedy into opportunity. It is up to those who can to help not only shed light on the past but make a future path more traversable for the victims, for those hurting and those current students and alumni who may need help to make sense of this.
     Synchronicity is the appearance of two or more events that seem to occur together by chance.  It's really so interesting to me at this juncture, as I am about to change my career path entirely to focus on education, that this occurred now. In August, I begin a Masters/PhD program that specifically deals with social change in education and the behavior of "communities"  as they pertain to teaching/learning environments. Well if what has transpired in the last few days isn't right up that alley, I don't know what is. How's that for synchronicity? 

     I keep going over and over the whole thing from the perspective of the culture in which we thrived versus the culture of today. It's difficult to view the past through today's lens, as they are, for sure, not "apples to apples." Our days were marked by a unquenched thirst for freedom, independence, breaking stereotypes, going beyond boundaries -- intellectually, sexually, physically-- smashing mores and taboos. We questioned. We asked. We experimented. And some got hurt. 

     I just read some research on the fact that in educational studies, the "psyche" of adolescent girls in academia wasn't even covered as a subject until the 1990s. So what we all were going through in the 70s to early 80s was truly ground-breaking -- from breaking the paradigm of the one-gender school behavioral system to elevating girls in academia to the sexual revolution to trying to figure out what gender "equality" was all about. 

     Clearly there were black holes into which jumped some deviant opportunists, predators.

     This is all so very interesting and sad...yet it is setting the stage for a giant leap forward…

     Yes, we need to be the stewards.

   
     So fucked up isn't it?? But so, so powerful.