Category Archives: community

Grabbing the Stage

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A big part of who I am stems from the blessing and curse of coming from a musical family.

On my mother’s side, my grandfather, Pop-Pop, was a symphony violinist. He lived next door to us when I was a child and I spent many hours watching him frown at the full length mirror as he practiced, carefully positioning the bow and playing each note over and over until he got it exactly how he wanted it. From him, I learned the importance of striving for perfection, even though reaching for it might seem impossible.

My father’s mother’s family, the Glicksteins, were just as passionate in their love of music and equally accomplished in their ability to play from the heart. My great-grandfather Abe Glickstein, a clarinet player, was known for giving Sunday afternoon living room concerts featuring his seven talented children for his immigrant neighbors at the turn of the 20th century, and for offering the services of a three-man klezmer combo (him and his two sons) to the community if music was needed for a wedding or other simcha. These great uncles, Max and Dave, went on to have notable musical careers, while their sister, my Grandma Jeanne, made her living teaching piano and recorder, and running summer music programs to spread the joy that fueled her life.

The curse of this story, as I wrote about extensively in my yet-to-be published memoir, Imperfect Pitch, was feeling that I had some sort of impossible musical bar to live up to, and I didn’t have either the patience or or the desire that Pop-Pop had to spend agonizing hour after hour at my instrument to achieve it.

But the blessing, which I think comes at least in part from my family constellation, is a love of the stage. Not so much for musical performance, since I’m still not as confident as I might want to be in that area. But give me a podium, and I’m in my happy place, whether I’m reading my poems or stories, talking on a panel about some aspect of writing craft, recounting my witness trips to the border and the Homestead Detention Center, standing up impromptu in front of a group of protesters on the street, or teaching the basics of classical argument theory to a room of bored college students.

There is something so magical about being listened to.

So, I get how disappointed my three-year-old grandson Manu felt when his parents told him they were going to take him to see the Tokyo Paradise Ska Band, which he has been totally obsessed with for a year, but, no, he was going to be on the stage with them, as he enacts when he listens to the videos, donning his sunglasses and strutting around his stage set of stacked mats, toy saxophone in one hand, mic in the other.

Because even though a seat in the audience can be a safe place, a time to relax, reset, and feel comfortably anonymous, there is something about getting out there on stage that can add a bit of technicolor to our often muted sense of self. Even if the journey there might feel like you’re standing on a balance beam above a pot of boiling oil, as I know it does for many who experience very real stage fright.

If that’s your story, I recommend, as my co-facilitator and I taught for many years in a course we developed called Public Speaking for the Terrified, to start small: read your work, share your art, play a song, or speak your heart to a trusted group of friends in your living room, making them promise that they will give you only praise for what they liked and what resonated. At some point you may be ready for a combo of both praise–never forget the praise–and critical feedback, but make sure to have a notetaker to write both of these things down. Otherwise, all you’ll remember is the criticism.

Whether it’s genetic or environmental or some of both, I’m grateful to my forbears for modeling not only their love of their art, but their passion for sharing it. And grateful that, for the most part, stage fright is not an issue for me. Perhaps some day I’ll take a more terrifying step and sign up at some large, anonymous karaoke bar. Or not.

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Confessions of a Closet Sports Fan

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True confessions! I’ve been addictively following the NBA playoffs.

This doesn’t fit in with image I project to most who know me, or the words I might use to describe myself: writer, activist, gardener, nature-lover. And like most, I abhor the money that casts its dark shadow over this and other big sports events. $10,000 for a ticket to Madison Square Garden is obscene. Even $1,000 that Mayor Mamdani spent for standing room at the top of the arena is obscene. And unnecessary. Sports should be for the people. All the people. Not a commodity that can be manipulated to squeeze as much money out of hopeful hearts as possible.

Yet, every night of the playoffs, I’ve tuned in on my free-trial Youtube TV subscription (which I will cancel at the end of its 21 days) my heart with the hordes and multitudes at the watch parties in Central Park. I have not lived in New York for 46 years, yet, this doesn’t make many any less of a New Yorker. There’s a certain “Only in New York” way we have about how we relate that transcends our diverse backgrounds and brings us together. I still remember being on the subway in 1969 when the Mets were in the World Series. Everyone who had one had their transistor radios glued to their ears. When Tommie Agee homered in Game 3, the entire subway car erupted in cheers.

Photo by Mark Dixon from Pittsburgh, PA, CC BY 2.0

This is the kind of comeraderie I often long for, a swelling excitement and connection among strangers for a common goal. I hate to say that I’ve felt this more often at sports events than at peace demonstrations, but unfortunately that’s true. There have been occasional exceptions–The Women’s March in DC in 2017; March for Nuclear Disarmament in New York 44 years ago today on June 12, 1982. But I can often feel a more compelling swell of excitement huddled around a television with people rooting for a similar outcome, even if that outcome is random and doesn’t really matter in the wider world. Or maybe because the stakes are lower, it’s easier not to feel the thick of fear and disappointment one might feel in the wake of a devastating Supreme Court decision or a harmful act committed by our government or another country.

To put this all in a little more context, I grew up in a sports-dominated household. No one played, but the TV was always on: baseball, football, basketball, hockey…I don’t know if I would have survived my teenage years without the Mets and the Knicks to divert my attention from my own angst to something random that was totally outside of my control, yet–at the time–mattered deeply. Finding friends who shared that passion made it easier to stay away from experimenting with the wilder world of drugs and alcohol and sex. We could ground ourselves in the safer land of fandom. I guess we could have also been as passionate about other things that I might consider more in my bailiwick now, like music or art. But sports was what was offered in my house–and in my city–as a balm of connection.

There’s a lot more to my sports story, but even now, I’m self-conscious about nerding out on too many extraneous details people are unlikely to want to hear. In fact, due to some hard-to-shed embarrassment, I’ve been procrastinating about writing this since Wednesday (the day I usually blog). But I guess that’s a good thing, because then I wouldn’t have been able to end with the Knicks’ amazing comeback in Game 4.

playitusa.com

(And yes, I totally believe T jinxed Game 3. If only instead, he’d donated some of his billions to buy everyday New Yorkers some tickets–what a PR coup that would have been!)

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Why Can’t This Night Be Different From All Other Nights?

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Photo: D. Dina Friedman

Of all the Jewish holidays, Passover is my favorite,  I’ve always liked that the Passover Haggadah (the book that is read during the seder that tells the story of the Jews’ liberation from slavery in Egypt) has so many metaphors that are easily adaptable to modern times. Over the years, I’ve spent many hours adapting the text to whatever issue is plaguing (pun intended) me most at the moment, as well as enjoying the contributions of my family and community in making the text and the rituals it includes meaningful and relevant.

But this year, with all the conflict going on in the world and in our own country, it’s hard to get into the mindset for celebration, even with the holiday’s themes of liberation against oppression and hope for the future. The small group I celebrated with last night started the night by acknowledging our fear, anger, and unease at what’s going on in our country and in the wider world. And yet, I was also so glad to be in this circle of friends, most of whom I’ve known for decades. When it was my turn it speak, I said, To me, Passover is about community, more than it’s about God, or Egypt, or any of that. 

As I think about that comment a day later, I’m wondering whether it’s actually true, or if I was just thinking off the top of my head. I’m not saying there’s no truth in what I said. Community is definitely a big factor, and I really don’t care that much about most of the traditional Passover story. But Passover does comprise more than community. It even comprises more than the yearly menu-squabbling and “back-seat cooking” as my partner and kids and I all pile into the kitchen to grate and chop the vegetables. Or the reminiscences of all the goofy things we used to do to keep it light and entertaining: putting the dog on the porch so he could walk in when we opened the door for the prophet Elijah, or the years we told the story through improvisation games, or through parodies of songs from musicals, or raps.

But there’s serious stuff, too: I love the metaphor of the internal journey through “the narrow place” (Egypt) and the casting off of internal “chomaytz” (the leavened products you don’t eat during Passover) as a way of ridding yourself of excessive ego, pride, or unresolved emotions. I love some of the side stories: the midwives who helped the Jewish women hide their babies instead of following orders to kill them; Nachsun, whom I wrote about last year, who jumped into the Red Sea, before the waters parted an act of incredible hope when it seemed there was no hope to be had.

And, there are some troublesome parts: Like the ten plagues as collective punishment against an entire people for the actions of a tyrant. Or, really, any aspect of “us” and “them,” as two separate entires with a winner and loser. I’m not saying that oppression of the Israelites in Biblical Egypt didn’t exist, but I wish I could think we were past oppressing others, and celebrating victories where innocent people, like the first-born children of the Egyptians, lost their lives.

And, of course, the elephant in the room: the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza where 64,000 children were killed or injured in 23 months of war. And the current U.S./Israel war agains Iran whose victims include 168 elementary school girls whose school was bombed. Hard to say, “next year in Jerusalem,” (the closing words of the seder) after that. I’d like to think that after 3,000 years we’ve moved beyond killing children, I’d even like to think we’ve moved beyond war, or beyond tyrants, but I guess that’s too much to hope for.

So I can understand why our host last night opened the seder by expressing how hard it was to even sit down and celebrate Passover. Yet, it was the small community of like-minded people I celebrated with that helped me feel able to take a small step back into my Jewish identity. We still can use the metaphors and inspiring parts of the story to envision a better world. And after that, act on them to make that vision more of a reality.

Chag Sameach!

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Art Saves Lives

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Next week I’ve been invited to participate in Mission Belonging’s annual solstice reading, offering poems that “that invite us to reflect on light and darkness in our lives” and also to say something about how Art Saves Lives, the backbone idea of their mission of “building bridges between veterans and citizens using the language of creative expression to promote empathy, foster understanding, and build authentic community.”

So, I’ve been thinking about how art saves lives. Especially for the core population of the Mission Belonging community: “service members, veterans, military family members, caregivers, and healthcare workers who have been gifted opportunities to use the arts as a tool for narration, self-care and socialization to offset their struggles with emotional and physical injuries caused by trauma.”

While I don’t check the box for any of these categories, I feel completely included as a civilian member of the Mission Belonging poetry workshop I attend every week, an absolute highlight I always look forward to. And I feel blessed and honored by the courage and vulnerability I consistently hear in the writing of my fellow workshop members. In so many ways, their art saves my life. It reminds me that being true to ourselves and then taking action from the core of these truths is one of our most powerful antidotes for dealing with these tumultuous times, whether they’re affecting us directly or indirectly as an individual, culture, country, and/or society. And writing–or any kind of art-making; writing just happens to be my main modality–can help us tunnel our way to this truth, which societal forces and life’s daily challenges tend to obscure.

I’m not sure whether art has directly saved my life. But when I think about the question, that tunnel image continues to come up. Maybe I can live some semblance of life in the darkness of the tunnel, but art is the way get to the truer, clearer, shining life of the light. Art also says that we matter: our stories, our ideas, the fluctuating weight of our feelings, the way we make sense of our often senseless world. And engaging in art with Mission Belonging (or in any supportive community context) assures us that whatever we need to express, there will be witnesses to hold it as the delicate, precious gift that it is. As is the creator of the art in question–also a delicate and precious gift.

Mission Belonging has continued to save many lives by opening more doors to the power of art, despite having lost a lot of government grant support this year. If you’re still working on year-end giving (or even if you’re not), I’d encourage you to consider a donation.

And my wish to you in this season of darkness: Find a way through the tunnel into the light.

Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

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The day I arrived in New York to help deal with my father’s medical emergency, they were repairing the sewer pipe under my parents’ house.

The onslaught of noise was deafening as workers cut through an entire square of concrete then lowered themselves into the cavernous maze of underground pipes to search for the blockage. It took them two days to find the troubled spot, which had already plagued my parents for a week: no showers, no laundry, minimal dishwashing, and a directive to flush the toilet only when absolutely necessary. And after all that noise and digging, the blockage turned out to be not in the area where they’d dug at all. They found the problem in the sad little brick-enclosed square of dirt my parents call the “front yard”–under a rosebush that had already been reduced to small rootball and a few aspiring fronds.

The next day, when my father was officially referred to hospice and people rained all that “death is a passage” stuff on us, I thought about that sewer pipe–also a passage. And I also thought about the Dylan Thomas villanelle and its repeating haunting lines: Do not go gentle into that good night … Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It isn’t that I want my father to fight against the reality of his dying. I feel grateful that he is not–and has never been–an angry or vengeful person. Even in his compromised state, while depressed about what is happening, he continues to exude kindness and express love and gratitude to those around him.

But I feel like raging. Not at the inevitability of my father’s death, but at the sadness of seeing him so frail and unable to do things for himself–the “dying” of my image of my 90+ year-old parents as timeless icons of longevity.

And I feel myself raging against the barely flickering “light” of my country. Yet this rage feels like a fruitless kick-the-floor-and-flail-my-arms temper tantrum. Pundits tell us to keep breathing and find joy. The sun is brilliant on the half-inch of freshly fallen snow today. But where is the balance between digging and doing what we can and totally abandoning ship, closing our doors and taking out whatever might constitute our modern-day “opium pipe” to lose ourselves in a stupor of disempowerment and apathy.

I’m forever grateful to Bishop Marianne Edgar Budde, who was able to channel her rage into a calm and quiet plea for mercy, focusing the whole time she spoke, toward whatever light might be left that’s still shining on who we could be–individually and collectively. And I’m wondering if that’s the kind of light that flashes before our eyes as we near the end of our lives in addition to reliving all of our life’s significant moments. I’m wondering what my father, an Emmy Award-winning journalist, is thinking as he sits hooked up to his oxygen machine with the New York Times spread on his lap, trying to stay awake long enough to get through more than a paragraph and make sense of all that’s happening around him.

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

While we all have to accept death, as hard as it is, we mustn’t go gentle into this dark time, or accept the numerous attacks on our Constitution as the legitimate prerogative of a new leader. I feel grateful for the many in our community who are joining together and channeling their quiet rage into action. Death may be a lonely endeavor, but raging can be a community enterprise. I’m grateful to the many who are standing up to support immigrants, transgender people, the environment, and the many other important issues that are under attack.

In fact, what keeps me finding joy is knowing I have community–both to support me during this difficult personal time and to work together on keeping the light shining.

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Mattering and the Power of Witnessing

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Writing is easy, you sit at the typewriter, open a vein and bleed.

Paul_012, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

My aim in writing has always been to get to a deeper, grittier place, beyond the personal into some universal but often unspoken experience. Yet, getting to the central core of rawness isn’t easy. I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve looked at an unfinished poem or piece of fiction and said to myself, “Push!” a process that feels as difficult as giving birth.

And at least when one gives birth, there’s a baby at the end of the effort. With creatives, the labor continues—the question of what lies behind the next edge continuing to linger as we try to reach deeper layers of mattering.

It’s important to realize that despite these efforts, sometimes our creative expression won’t be easily discernible—or even appropriate—for an outside audience. Occasionally I write “private poems” solely for my own cathartic release in lancing some emotional clot.

Yet, having gentle, loving witnesses can enhance and deepen our creative confidence—as long as they stay in the role of witnesses, not judges. When a witness tells me what they liked or noticed, they tap into that shared place I’m reaching for and let me know that my words touched them—and mattered.

If you’ve never shared your art, music, dancing, writing, etc. with other people, or only had bad experiences because the people you shared it with gave you unsolicited and unhelpful criticism, I recommend finding someone who understands the difference between witnessing and judging. (Note: I’m not against and fully aware of the benefits of constructive criticism, but judging is a different process from witnessing, which should be done at a time when the creator is asking for and expecting it.)

There are many community writing and other creative-based class settings that use a witnessing framework. For dancers–or for anyone who simply likes to move–Authentic Movement is built on the model of mover/neutral observer.

If classes don’t appeal, find a friend you trust—perhaps someone who’s also engaged in something creative where you can both share the roles of creator and witness. Remind each other to keep comments to what you liked and/or noticed, and then bask in their affirmation that yes, indeed, you matter.

Moonstruck

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Because I’ve been traveling so much and fighting off a benign but annoyingly persistent respiratory illness, I’ve been late to the table writing about the eclipse.

But I was one of many folks who drove several hours to the totality zone for a few minutes of day-time darkness and a gaze at the celestial wonder of the corona, which we shared with strangers in a community park in a small town in northern Vermont. Things seemed pleasantly normal in the hour before the big event. People donned eclipse glasses to sneak views of the disappearing sun, children ran through the grass playing, and adults waited in lines for free pizza cooked in the community stone oven or to silk-screen a t-shirt as an Eclipse Day souvenir. But when totality hit, something shifted in the energy. There was a hush among the crowd, a kind of collective “wow.” My eclipse glasses now dark, I was nervous about viewing the corona with unprotected eyes, but there it was, eerie and other-worldly, the tiny ring of light flaring in asymmetrical bursts before settling to a steady glow like a small spark of hope.

Jongsun Lee, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Then the moon moved away and a crescent of sun reappeared. And again, I could feel the crowd’s energy shifting, a waft of ebullience, giddiness from having lived through a bewildering darkness and come out the other side.

What struck me then was not the moon, but the connectedness I felt to all these strangers. There are so many metaphors I could make out of this, it’s hard to know where to begin. But in these times of constant fractiousness, there was a poignancy in that moment that felt important, a sense of all of us humans as anthropological creatures who, deep in our DNA, know how to co-exist, especially under the awe of something so much greater than ourselves. And maybe I’ve been “moonstruck,” but I can’t stop hoping that there might be away out of a darkness that makes “othering” human beings and then harming those “others” acceptable.

So I’m offering this poem from Here in Sanctuary–Whirling as a starting point for contemplation. And I also invite all of us to take some time to close our eyes and envision the metaphor of the sun reappearing after totality. What can each of us do to bring back the ebullience and giddiness that comes with connection?

 

I DO NOT KNOW
                     –D. Dina Friedman

Why the wind is so fierce today. Why some people die
and others recover. Does a tornado choose its targets?
Is there a blueprint somewhere with the secret path
of my life mapped out? Will this trail I’m on
connect with the ridgeline, or will it keep crossing
the same stream? How do I get to the bunker,
and what’s hidden there now that the army no longer has it?
I do not know how dirt feels to a carrot root, or to my brother
six feet under. Is he able to read the prayer books
placed on his coffin through some double miracle
of semi-resurrection and dyslexia cured? What does it feel like
to a dyslexic when letters leave their prescribed places?
Why do bodies compartmentalize into people who love each other
hating the people across the river, who love each other
and hate the people across the river? Why do we have to teach toddlers
to share sand-buckets? Why don’t they do it naturally?
Why don’t we do it naturally?
Why don’t we do it?

In Here in Sanctuary–Whirling, Querencia Press, 2024.
Orginally published in Silkworm 15.

 

 

Support Your Local Writer

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After a week and a half of cooking nearly every day, I still have 7 beets, 11 carrots, one huge sweet potato and one huge daikon radish. And more food to come on Saturday!

In western Massachusetts, where I live, supporting the local economy is a huge value that transcends red/blue leanings. At the top of the list is buying from local farmers. In the summer, you can find a farmers market in one of the surrounding towns almost every day of the week. They are always packed with people  willing to spend a premium for the privilege of fresh, local food and the knowledge that they’re contributing to their neighbors’ labors of love. I also purchase summer and winter farm shares from various CSA farms for both myself and my children and their families. This means that at this time of year I’m basing more of my diet than I’d like on parsnips, radishes, and beets, but it’s still worth it to know I’m eating in sync with the season and supporting my community.

A second value that many of us share is supporting local businesses. While it’s often easier and sometimes cheaper to shop on-line (and I fully recognize that there are many people with various health or financial challenges for whom that’s essential), I try whenever possible to patronize local stores, often setting a challenge to myself to locally source all my holiday shopping. And since books are one of my favorite gifts to give, I end up spending a lot of my holiday shopping time at local bookstores. We have so many good ones. My favorites are (in alphabetical order): Amherst Books, Booklinks, Book Moon, Broadside, and the Odyssey Bookshop.

Independent bookstores often have an on-line component, which means you can order most books also available on Amazon through their systems. The price might be a few dollars higher than the Amazon price, but to me, that’s no different than paying a local farmer a little bit more to assure that they can meet their bottom line and stay in business.

However, not all books can be obtained at local bookstores. Many smaller independent publishers encounter obstacles or simply don’t choose to go through the extra hassle of getting their books on the Ingram distribution platform that these independent bookstores use. I had to lobby hard with my publisher before they were able and willing to get the book on Ingram–under a different ISBN, just to make things confusing–and that didn’t happen until six weeks after the book was published. In the meantime, I was grateful to the bookstores who were willing to take copies of Immigrants on consignment in order to address the concerns of many of my friends who told me they’d love to buy my book, but only if they could get it at a local bookstore. And I’m especially grateful to the Odyssey Bookshop for hosting my book launch event, now re-scheduled for February 7.

And I’m grateful to the friends who bought the book to support me, just as I try to support local writers by buying their books–another way of giving back to the community. This week I ordered three books from people I know through writing: Dean Cycon’s Finding Home: (Hungary 1945); John Sheirer’s For Now, and Eileen Cleary’s Wild Pack of the Living. I’m looking forward to reading these books. And if I like them, I’ll make to write a brief review on Goodreads and Amazon (I buy just enough from Amazon to make sure they’ll accept me as a reviewer). That’s another easy way to support a local writer. You don’t have to sound brilliant–and I generally don’t. One-to-two sentences can make a big difference.

And even if you’re not a big reader, buy a book for someone you think would enjoy it. Or buy an EP from a local musician, or a small piece of art or craft item from a visual artist. Just as we need fresh produce to nourish our bodies, we need art in all its forms to nourish our spirits. And we need to let the local artists in our community know we care.