Intersecting Worlds
My list began with my personal address book, plus names sent by readers, others cribbed from mail sent by groups like Dance Theater Workshop. Even when recipients aren’t visible, you can sometimes see them using HTML Anyone can get off my list with a one-word email, “Remove.” I hope you won’t want to.
My blog, Reality Check, was inspired by Barack Obama. Athough not all my readers admire him, some keep reading anyway, for which I’m grateful. I try to keep myself out of most posts. Today is the exception. In the photo, left, I’m dancing with Martha Graham.
Erving Goffman wrote an academic best-seller, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. He revealed that how we act depends on where we are and who we are with. I’ll try to identify who I become in varying contexts.
Before company comes, we (Liz and I) vacuum the apartment and tidy up. I close the door to my work room which is beyond tidying up.
If I go to a meeting of Dancers Over 40, I wear an Italian sport jacket, gray slacks, maroon shirt, paisley tie, to project an image of an over-the-hill but still dapper dancer.
In conversation with someone stimulating (often female), if something amusing pops into my head, out it comes. I don’t want to be too over-the-hill.
At home I allow the grouch to show. Liz seems not to mind much.
On the (few) occasions I’m invited to a rehearsal of my old troupe, I’m a hoary oracle, passing on wisdom of eras past.
At a local restaurant, I’m a neighborhood denizen who mostly orders matzo ball soup.
To the Latino clerks in the local deli, I’m the character who’s willing to show them Charleston, Suzy-Q, mambo, cha-cha, conga moves, and in return they show me meringue and salsa.
In my workroom, in front of my computer screen, I’m the writer who was put on the back-burner when hit by the unexpected, irrational, and irrepressible need to dance.
To the youngest members of my family—five to nineteen—I’m a hopelessly adoring relic from a history-book world that can capture their attention for seconds at a time.
To readers, I’m political, sentimental, angry, contemplative, and to some, mostly wrong.
To those who email, I’m a grateful recipient and always try to answer.
With my few remaining WW2 buddies, meeting via the Internet, I go back in time to a great adventure and terrible war, now cosseted in the glow of vanished youth.
On the day after Obama is reelected, Reality Check will vanish and I will return to my novel of a world millennia in the future, when earth has a total of 5 million people, they all live a thousand years, each spiritually bonded with a sentient tree, and God has been mathematically proven to exist.
My list began with my personal address book, plus names sent by readers, others cribbed from mail sent by groups like Dance Theater Workshop. Even when recipients aren’t visible, you can sometimes see them using HTML Anyone can get off my list with a one-word email, “Remove.” I hope you won’t want to.
My blog, Reality Check, was inspired by Barack Obama. Athough not all my readers admire him, some keep reading anyway, for which I’m grateful. I try to keep myself out of most posts. Today is the exception. In the photo, left, I’m dancing with Martha Graham.
Erving Goffman wrote an academic best-seller, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. He revealed that how we act depends on where we are and who we are with. I’ll try to identify who I become in varying contexts.
Before company comes, we (Liz and I) vacuum the apartment and tidy up. I close the door to my work room which is beyond tidying up.
If I go to a meeting of Dancers Over 40, I wear an Italian sport jacket, gray slacks, maroon shirt, paisley tie, to project an image of an over-the-hill but still dapper dancer.
In conversation with someone stimulating (often female), if something amusing pops into my head, out it comes. I don’t want to be too over-the-hill.
At home I allow the grouch to show. Liz seems not to mind much.
On the (few) occasions I’m invited to a rehearsal of my old troupe, I’m a hoary oracle, passing on wisdom of eras past.
At a local restaurant, I’m a neighborhood denizen who mostly orders matzo ball soup.
To the Latino clerks in the local deli, I’m the character who’s willing to show them Charleston, Suzy-Q, mambo, cha-cha, conga moves, and in return they show me meringue and salsa.
In my workroom, in front of my computer screen, I’m the writer who was put on the back-burner when hit by the unexpected, irrational, and irrepressible need to dance.
To the youngest members of my family—five to nineteen—I’m a hopelessly adoring relic from a history-book world that can capture their attention for seconds at a time.
To readers, I’m political, sentimental, angry, contemplative, and to some, mostly wrong.
To those who email, I’m a grateful recipient and always try to answer.
With my few remaining WW2 buddies, meeting via the Internet, I go back in time to a great adventure and terrible war, now cosseted in the glow of vanished youth.
On the day after Obama is reelected, Reality Check will vanish and I will return to my novel of a world millennia in the future, when earth has a total of 5 million people, they all live a thousand years, each spiritually bonded with a sentient tree, and God has been mathematically proven to exist.
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