Author: Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families. For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million. She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings. She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.

Love IS Strange and the Film is Beautiful

Love is Strange Dinner Charlie cropped

Today’s lesson: When Rick Atkins picks a movie that ISN’T American Pie, go. Tonight we saw Love Is Strange – a warm, loving, measured story beautifully built and executed.  I am still reeling from The Normal Heart, as I wrote here  and I hadn’t wanted another sad tale in the same week.

SO when I heard what this film was about, I balked. No More Sad. I ended up agreeing to go though, and am so very glad I did.

In most cases with “small” films like this people say they’ll wait for Netflix; there are no special effects or broad vistas that require the big screen. In this case though, Manhattan was such a part of the story that it was worth seeing it in all its glory.

It wasn’t even sad.  Sad things happened but there was so much love and humor, Charlie Tahan, the young man in this photo, was so wonderful and Lithgow and Molina‘s couple was so much like any couple who’d been together a long time that there was also a deep familiarity that was a great part of the pleasure on the journey we took with them all.

No big conclusions here.  We just got home and these are my first reactions but I doubt they will change; go and see for yourself and comment here if you have thoughts to share.

 

The Normal Heart – a Kick in the Gut

HugOf course there’s no such thing as time travel.  Of course not.

The Normal Heart though, for anyone who was in New York in the 80’s, comes about as close as you can get.  We watched it after the Emmys.  I had avoided it, knowing how troubling it would no doubt be, but it felt wrong to not look.  Too many people had done that 30 years ago.  Here’s how one New Yorker described, to the New York Times,  Manhattan in May of 1987:

‘Going to funerals has become a way of life,” said George Getzel, a Hunter College social work professor who counsels AIDS patients as a volunteer. ”People in their 70’s and 80’s experience this but here people in their 20’s and 30’s are visiting the sick at homes and in hospitals and burying the dead. Some are themselves sick. It’s become a regularized aspect of the lives of gay men and others like myself who are involved.

The Normal Heart slammed me back to those days:

The day, when I worked at the TODAY SHOW, that my friend Susan Weaver did one of the first AIDS stories that included a live guest in the studio.  There was fear in the air that morning.  A couple of studio crew members asked to be replaced and people debated in advance whether to shake hands with the young man who had the courage to show up and talk about what was happening to him, to New York and, we know now, to all of us.

The day that Allison Gertz, who succumbed to AIDS in 1992 at the age of 26 (and who spoke at many high schools to very effectively remind teenagers that for her, AIDS came from a single encounter with an infected man and that heterosexual sex was anything but safe) spoke, with enormous impact, at my own son’s high school.

The day that our sweet friend Stephen left us.

The day one of my oldest friends told me that of his entire book group, he was the only survivor.

The day Elizabeth Glaser,  wife of actor Paul Michael Glaser, stricken through a blood transfusion during the birth of her daughter Ariel, who also contracted the disease, showed up at a Georgetown party lobbying and fundraising simultaneously.  Ariel’s illness drove Glaser to form the Pediatric Aids Foundation, later renamed the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation in her honor.  She was everywhere, from Georgetown to Hollywood to endless television appearances, raising money and awareness until she died in 1994.

The day we watched Mark Harmon, the loveable, mischievous Dr. Caswell, walk away alone from the brilliant St. Elsewhere, his own AIDS diagnosis and certain death drawing him to an AIDS hospice to provide care until he died among his patients.

For everything here came days and weeks worth, years worth of deep melancholy and, for so many, pain, death and grief.    Because New Yorkers live so close together, ride mass transit, hang out in public parks, buy food from hotdog carts on the corner and, even if they’re really really rich, can’t stay clear of strangers, we all knew it, felt it and feared it.

Of course, AIDS is still with us, a terrible epidemic in the developing world, and still present in the West.  Here the reality is different today, if not entirely.

So yes, The Normal Heart was time travel; the gift of a perfect document reminding us, and portraying for those who came after, of a terrible, terrible time.

 

Ferguson, Bloggers and Race in America: Even if We Think We Know, We Don’t

protestinpeace
Cindy and Kelley cropped2

One of the bloggers I admire most is Kelly Wickham, who writes  Mocha Momma. I “met” her online 7 years ago because she was a reading specialist and, as the parent of a dyslexic child, I was so grateful for the committed, loving, determined way she wrote about her work. I kind of stalked her in comments until we met at BlogHer in 2007. (Actually I also stalked her after that, too, but at least by then she knew who I was.)

She writes, with honesty and rage, about race.  About family, and  love, and education and whatever else occurs to her, but also about race.  I’ve learned a lot from her, including how much I didn’t know.  As the years have passed, and more women of color have joined BlogHer and Kelly’s Facebook feed, I’ve learned from others, too.   The BlogHer community grew and widened, and with it the gut understanding of the whole community.  On our blogs we tell the truth, and the different truths shared by the bloggers who are now a part of my life have been an immeasurable gift.

Of course it is beyond wrong that, in 2014, we still have to seek diversity, to go out of our way to learn lessons we should have learned long ago, and that those most in pain still experience so much that we haven’t figured out how to learn.

The trouble is that there hasn’t been nearly enough intersection between us and those experiencing  the harshest emotions that emerge in response to American racism.

I remember once talking with author Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, who said to me “Don’t you see, we black mothers must be lionesses to protect our sons.”  I thought of her statement often as I was raising my own.

I remember a colleague describing to me, when we were both pregnant, her fear of the first time someone called her not-yet-born child a “n*$%#&r” – of what she would say to him, what she would do.

But despite having African-American colleagues and friends, I’m not sure I ever, until these past days, completely heard the depth of anger and despair that lives within so many.

It’s not that I didn’t know; most people I know care about and have seen plenty of racial injustice and have worked, in our own ways, to change it.  But that’s different from opening someone else’s door and walking in.  It’s on fire in there.  And it should be.

Listen to these:

Everyone can’t stand up the moment something pisses the off and we’re all different in how we react. Some people shut down because they don’t even know where to start. Some people just need a nudge to be emboldened to speak. Some people need to know they’re needed before they speak.

Well if you need that nudge, here it is. If you’re afraid because you don’t want to say the wrong thing, push past that fear. Because right now, your silence about the continued devaluation of Black lives is wrong. Your lack of acknowledgement is not ok. If you need tips before speaking out here’s 3: don’t blame the person who was killed. Don’t say you’re color-blind. Acknowledge the racism at play.

Speaking up when it matters is usually when it’s also the hardest. When your voice shakes, that’s when you’re standing in truth. But that’s usually when it is most needed. And when you do it, someone else might be encouraged to do the same. Do not be silent.  Awesomely Luvvie 

I am outraged but I do not know what to do with my outrage that might be productive, that might move this world forward toward a place where black lives matter, and where black parents no longer need to have “the talk” with their children about how not to be killed by police and where anger over a lifetime of wrongs is not judged, but understood and supported. Roxanne Gay

Black bodies matter. Black bodies matter. Black bodies matter. Say it with me: Black bodies matter. This isn’t a question. This isn’t a euphemism. This isn’t an analogy. This is a fact. Black cis and trans boys, girls, men, and women and non-binary folks, they all matter. Until that fact becomes a universal truth due to the precise liberty and justice the Constitution of this country promises, I won’t stop fighting and neither should you.  Jenn M. Jackson

But it wasn’t what I could see and hear as Ferguson residents fled and were pursued into residential areas that gave me chills. It was what I couldn’t see. Because behind the walls of those smoke-shrouded homes were parents comforting their frightened children. I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were there. They could have been me. They could have been my children.Kymberli Barney for Mom 2.0

This is what I need, dear friend.

I need to know that you are not merely worried about this most tragic of worst case scenarios befalling my son; I need to know that you are out there changing the ethos that puts it in place. That you see this as something that unites us as mothers, friends and human beings.

My son needs me, as much as yours needs you. Sadly, my son needs me more. He needs someone to have his back, when it seems that the police, the men he’d wave to with excitement as a little boy, see him as a being worthy only of prison or death.

I need you, too, because I can’t do this alone.     Keesha Beckford “Dear White Moms” on BonBon Break

This is where the story gets tricky. This is where our son paced up and down the stairs—in his under shirt, gym shorts and crew socks—telling us about the police who came to our door and handcuffed our son and pulled him outside.    “Why?” It was the only question I could come up with — “why?”       

His hands ran over his face and found each other behind his head. I knew this look too. The one of lost words—of previous trauma—of discouragement. 

“I don’t know. There’s some robberies in the area? I guess? And they saw me here—I don’t know. They thought it was me. They thought it was me and wouldn’t listen. They didn’t believe me that this was my house.”

He shook his head and looked at me. “It didn’t even matter that I had a key, moms.”   Elora Nicole

For each of these there are dozens and dozens more.  No more to say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/20/white-people-black-people-michael-brown-death-ferguson

How Did I Miss “The Giver?”

The Giver sized upThe movie is coming.  I saw the trailer.  But it wasn’t the story I thought it was; it turns out that all these years the book I remembered as Lois Lowry’s The Giver was in fact Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s The Keeper!.  Which is pretty embarrassing given that I reviewed that one for The Washington Post.  And The Giver?  I hadn’t even read it.

Yesterday I did.  I so wish I had been 14 when I found it, but it was published in 1993 and won the Newbery Medal in 1994 so that’s past not only my 14th birthday but that of one of my son’s!  It’s very gripping and beautifully written, but there’s been so much YA dystopian fiction since then that it’s hard to imagine the punch in the gut it must have been when it appeared.

As a veteran of the Divergent trilogy and The Hunger Games (and, ok, the Twilight Series but they don’t count) as well as countless post-nuclear–holocaust novels and a ton of cyberfiction, I’m an old hand in this neck of the woods.  Even so, the intent of The Giver is a little different.   There’s no hunger, no war, not even any pain.  It’s a twisted version of John Lennon’s Imagine.

Except, of course, it isn’t.

The “sameness” that rules this world has murdered color and music and laughter and love.  Oh – and babies, too.  One person, “the Giver” is the sole custodian of all memories of the bitter, the painful and the sad.   We know this will not stand.  And that’s the point.

We had a sign up in my college dorm – a banner across the front porch: “Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.” — William Faulkner, The Wild Palms  Those are the words and feelings of young people and artists.  And it is the battle against nothing the Lowry offers her young readers.  As she told the New York Times:   “Kids deserve the right to think that they can change the world.”

When the Giver helps our young hero Jonas decide that beauty and emotion are worth the terrible prices we pay to be fully human, we are all empowered to imagine that we can — no must, join him.  Take a stand.  Change a mind.  Solve a problem.  Correct an injustice.  Fall in love.  Break our hearts or someone else’s.  Be alive.

And that’s the power of The Giver, as the rest of you have probably known for years.

 

Thanks to the Man Who Sent Me to BlogHer ’06 and Now It’s ’14 and I’m Still Showing Up

BH14_10th_logo

In 2006, I was working with David Aylward and the National Strategies firm.  He doesn’t know this but there’s a story (If you know me you know there’s almost always a story.)  We had a client who wanted to reach parents.  David hired me to help and I had this big idea about making a parent website to promote them.  Well.
David sort of said “What about these blogs I keep hearing about? Would that be better?” I knew so little about blogging that I had to go look it up online. I found a story about this little conference in San Jose called BlogHer, meeting for only its second year. David and I convinced our client that I should attend this mysterious event and off I went along with fliers for our product and real curiosity about who these women were and what they were up to.  Stacey and cindy cropped Me with jenn pozner smaller photo 3   Cindy and Kelley cropped Cindy and Sarah G cropped

 

 

Here is what I received – from BlogHer 2006 and every one since:

1.   Access to an entirely new world of remarkable women (and men too.)   Including ( a little bit of a yearbook list) Elisa Camahort Page and Lisa Stone and Jory Des Jardins and Morra Aarons-Mele and Cooper Munroe and Emily McKhann and Liz Gumbinner and Kristen Chase and Asha Dornfest and Jennifer Burdette Satterwhite and Mary Spivey Tsao and Danielle Wiley and people I haven’t mentioned here (Sorry – some I’m not completely sure who I met in 2006 and who later.) Feels like I’ve known you all forever as well as Sarah Granger and Kelly Wickham and Jill Miller Zimon and Joanne Bamberger and Stacey Ferguson and Cynthia Liu and Anita Sarah Jackson and Jenn Pozner and  Cheryl Contee (and and and)  And that doesn’t count the new (to me) folks like Sharon Hodor Greenthal!.

2.  An entirely new way to communicate and create.

3.   More fun than a barrel of groovy blogger women knew they could deliver. And – here’s the reason I’m writing this post at all:

4.   Another decade at least of being part of and participating in the new parts of the world – online and on screens, instead of watching from the bleachers.

Lots of boomer women have joined me and the other early birds each year and I am certain they feel the same way (I’ve asked several and besides they’ve written about it.)  At a time when many of our friends are settling into a more and more peer-centered life, we have the gift of having broadened, rather than narrowed, our world and hearing the voices of women we never would have known about, much less known for real. So David, thank you for the gift of my entry into this universe and for the imagination and vision that opened your mind to its possibilities.  It’s a beautiful place to hang out and I’ll always remember who sent me through the door.

Margot Adler Sang at My Wedding

Margo in the foreground; that's me in the back.
Margo in the foreground; that’s me in the back.

It was 1971.  The song – no surprise to anyone who was young then, was Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Ed McCurdy’s anti-war anthem.  We knew we couldn’t get married in the middle of the war that had defined much of our lives without acknowledging it, and the song was the perfect way.  Margot was amazing, her voice clear and passionate; people even cried as we two 20-somethings stood, mid-ceremony, and Margot sang.  She had a great voice, had actually been a music person forever, and attended the famed Music and Art High School in Manhattan.

We met cute.  A friend brought her into the Senate Radio-TV Gallery, just off the press balcony overlooking the Senate.  Reporters wrote their spots there, and there was a small studio where Senators could come and make statements for the cameras.  I didn’t know Margot, but her Pacifica Radio friend knew she had a question that any pal of Margot’s would have loved.

“Pacifica (the progressive, listener-supported NY-based FM radio station) wants to hire me to cover the White House.  I’ve just come back from Cuba where I was helping the Venceremos Brigade harvest sugar cane.  Will that be a problem?”

This was Richard Nixon’s White House she was asking about.  You can imagine my answer.

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

From then on, until I left Washington with the man who is still my husband, our adventures were many, and varied and intense.  The moment that rises to the top though, is a small one, very Margot – precise and painful.

We had seen Love Story, the shameless, sentimental, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” Love Story.  (Yeah, I know, but everyone went – even politicos like us.)  She was quite upset, more than I would have thought – and I never go by Mt. Sinai Hospital on Fifth Ave without remembering it.  “What I hated most” she said, “was the scene on the street outside the hospital where my mother died.  It was like they threw it in there to make the whole thing extra painful.”

It’s a small story but it always stayed with me.  Along with the time we came to NY after we had moved to Palo Alto so Rick could finish school.  We were staying with her and we walked in and there in the front hall was her altar.  It was the first time we learned of her decision to follow her Wiccan self and it was such a weird way to find out.  She kind of said “Well I couldn’t just put it in a letter, right?”

She was, of course, a brilliant reporter and writer and thinker.  She was fun and alive and full of curiosity and political brilliance and personal warmth and charm.  I hadn’t seen her in a long time, but this week, she’s very much with me, along with the memories of that day, and of course, this song.

 

Obvious Child: So Much More than an “Abortion Movie”

obvious child in boxMy hands were shaking as I left the theater.  Obvious Child is not traumatic, exactly, it’s just so real.  There’s even a line about “old men in black robes.”  You already know the story.  What you don’t know — can’t know — until you see the film is that the story is just a frame upon which to hang a remarkable set of truths, some painful, some still painfully true, some funny and touching and surprising.

At first I wasn’t even sure I liked our heroine, Donna.  She was careless and immature (but also  lovable and self-deprecating) and — funny.  Of course in some ways she had to be. These circumstances can’t be picture-book or the movie is propaganda instead of the affecting work of filmmaking that it is.

I am closer to her parents’ age than to hers, so the role that they, particularly her mother (SPOILER ALERT) played was especially moving, as she told her “kitchen table abortion” story and, when it counted, flattened the wall that had kept mother and daughter apart for so long.  It was a stark reminder not only of the realities that all women share, but also of what women my age knew to be true when we were young: termination of an unintended pregnancy was a risk to our lives.  A risk many of us fear has returned.

Right now, today, we face assaults on all sides: contraception, equal pay, voting rights, civil rights and of course, abortion.  The quiet, sometimes funny, sometimes incredibly sad, journey through this film evokes grief over the threats we know are emerging with more and more power.  It’s one woman’s story from one wild night to shock to truly loving families and friends who can’t quite compensate for the crisis to the inevitably sad, lonely moment as the procedure unfolds to the life that lies ahead.

The difference, the reason Obvious Child is so much more than “that abortion movie” is that it offers characters we come to love, a crisis we all recognize, a family clearly a product of the open child rearing that many of us chose over the stratified parenting we experienced as well as  loving, truth-telling, strong friends and fully-developed principal characters with depth and, under all that irreverent Millennial camouflage, deep sensitivity and honor.

Hail and Farewell: Leaving Camp Seabourn

crew farewell 3 They all marched down the center aisle of the salon to echoes of No Day but Today, the lovely song from Rent . They’re all young, and from more than 30 countries: engineers and stewards, restaurant staff and destination coordinators, Captain and cruise director, performers and crew.

It was the last night of the trip and we’d just left Petersburg, one of the world’s loveliest cities.

Our church cropped Inside spilled blood cropped Catherine palace rick cindyThe drama of its grim history, combined with its beauty, left all of us with full hearts.  The emotion and the fact that in the morning our floating dormitory would deposit us and all our worldly goods in Stockholm and end the magic journey left us vulnerable.  Watching these young people, who had been so deeply involved in our lives, slammed us up and over the top, leaving nearly 300 of us moved and weepy.

For a bunch of worldly travelers, who’ among us had been everywhere from Antarctica to Burma to Saigon, we were pretty sappy.  The staff would welcome new cruisers hours after we left, but this artful end to a perfect trip, so much like the last day of camp, really, was sentimental and perfect.

 

Living with History: Ghosts of WWII Still Haunt Europe

Outside the shipyard where Solidarity was born
Outside the shipyard where Solidarity was born

There’s Europe, and then there’s Europe. Before St. Petersburg, we visited Gdansk, Poland and Klaipeda, Lithuania, each with a great (and strategically valuable) coastline and harbor.  Along with those very desirable traits came a dark, terrible, history of invasion and occupation, Nazis and Communists and pre-Nazi Germans in the 20th Century alone. Listen to the guides and it sounds as if the last of them left only last week, the memories are so fresh. Each city was all but obliterated after the War, first by the Nazis as they fled and then by the victorious Russians who declared the residents “Nazis” and burned much of what hadn’t been bombed. Jesus mourns 3,000 priests murdered in Auschwitz from St Mary's Cathedral

In Gdansk, along with the Jews, many Poles, including 3,000 priests, died in concentration camps.  This statue of Jesus mourning the 3,000 priests murdered in Auschwitz is from the gorgeous Gdansk St. Mary’s Church was placed there in their honor.  A visit to this city is a rapid education in the continued immediacy of the devastation and misery of the War and the Soviet occupation that followed.  It isn’t history, it’s family.

Veterans of Siberian exile sing songs of their country
In Lithuania they work to preserve memories of forced exile to Siberia and Soviet abuse through an ever-shrinking choir of village elders, many of them survivors of the Siberian deportations, on the lawn of a one-room museum that combines these memories with a commemoration of WWII partisans.

Klaipeda partisan 2

While there is little argument about the roles that Poland and Lithuania had in the Holocaust, I’m offering these examples to demonstrate the immediacy of the War that remains among the communities even today.    Wherever we’ve gone in these places, or in Helsingborg Sweden entire tours are constructed around these memories.

It was quite a shock to meet the ghosts that still haunt these old cities.  Gdansk is charming, and of course visiting the scene where Solidarity was born was wonderful.  What really left with us though, was the enduring impact of a war that ended long before many of those affected were even born.