Don't Gel Too Soon

That Was No Commercial! That Was My Dad

I really loved my dad. So did my kids. Our first grandson carries his name. There’s a reason for that, and the magic of this commercial is that it understands and validates that reason.

Every great ad is supposed to tell a story, but this one doesn’t have to; instead, it validates our own. For any daughter whose dad believed in her, listened to and argued respectfully with her opinions and loved her unconditionally, especially a daughter whose dad is no longer here, the magic of this small moment is that, for 30 seconds, it almost brings him back, allows us to feel again the warm embrace of that love.

Of course its main mission is to sell something, I know. But I’m grateful that this one, as it sold, gave us something lovely in return.

Oh Gwyneth! Mom to Mom to Mom

Gwyneth Paltrow has serious mom shoes to fill. Her own mother, Blythe Danner (you’ve probably seen her in those osteoporosis ads, or as almost everybody’s TV/movie mom…) is a spectacular actress who took a long professional hiatus to stay home with her kids as they grew up. If you had seen her show up at that MASH unit in Korea as Hawkeye Pierce’s great lost love, or as Alma in Eccentricities of a Nightingale you’d know just how much she gave up and we all lost. Her daughter has often acknowledged how aware she was of that decision.

I think one reason it’s tough to watch all the hating on Gwyneth, especially by other women, is that her mother is so extraordinary. I interviewed her once for a story on the Girl Scouts, of all things, and she was fierce. About acting, about her leave from acting, about not raising her kids in Hollywood, about almost everything.

As I’ve watched her daughter all these years, with weird baby names and regimens and what seem like odd decisions, I’ve watched her the way a mother might. Understanding and probably respecting the quest, the efforts to build an original life and, of course, the professional success, and worrying about The Interview and other events that made her sound more shallow than she probably is. Springing to her defense, as Danner did, seems reasonable. The downpour of venom does not.

I know I’m challenging a lot of women I deeply respect but it just seems so — unnecessary. The women of America face a true political emergency, and if the right takes over Congress this fall we are in real danger. Let’s hate more on the people responsible for that and leave this poor, complicated woman to fix what she can and recover from the rest.

From Bunny to Brave Leader of Us All. Happy Birthday Gloria!

Gloria in her "underground" Playboy Bunny garb for her 1963 expose in SHOW Magazine. — Gloria in her “underground” Playboy Bunny garb for her 1963 expose in SHOW Magazine.

I was 17 the first time I saw this, a Pittsburgh kid with grand ambitions for worldliness and intellectual heft and the ability to do the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink; so many that I actually subscribed to magazines like The Saturday Review, The New Yorker and SHOW: the Magazine of the Arts, where Gloria’s famous Playboy Club expose first appeared.

My reaction: “What a showboat, dumb thing to do!” My (never-less-than-honest) mother responded “You’re just jealous!” And she was right. Gloria had done something I so wanted to do – and so early in her career! How could I ever get from a Monongahela River mill town to that?

I never dreamed that Gloria, too, came from an industrial town – Toledo – much less that we would both have attended the same college, that I would hear her speak at my sister’s Smith graduation, and that, amazingly, I would actually come to know this remarkable woman. And here, on her 80th birthday, is what I learned:

In 1974, I told one of Ms’ spectacular co-founders how much I admired her. She replied “That’s how I feel about Gloria.” Heroes have heroes too, and hers was Gloria.

In 1982, for Ms. Magazine‘s 10th birthday, I produced an anniversary story called “A Day in the Life of Gloria Steinem” for the Today Show. The camera crew and I took a train from Penn Station to Philadelphia with her and followed her from event to event, including a couple of large public appearances. At least once every couple of minutes, a woman would walk up to her to thank her for something: courage, perspective, “you changed my life.”

Every time, every interruption, every stop on the street or in the hotel lobby or the ball room or the train, she treated each woman as if she were the first one she’d ever met. She listened intently. She responded in a very personal way. Every time.

To Gloria, every woman: each of us, all of us, has mattered to her. We are not just a formidable, critical cause, we are women who one by one by one have been living the lives women live, unequal, unheralded, amazing lives.

It is this that has made her the most remarkable of leaders, of change agents and of women. Never, in all the marches and speeches and honors and sadnesses has she forgotten that each one of us is all of us. She is not just a leader, she is a shining example. And inside each of us, we know it.

Happy Birthday Gloria – and thanks, from all of us here now and the girls and women yet to come.

Take a look at this MAKERS profile, too.

Darrell Issa, Rudy Giuliani and Debo Adegbile: What a Crummy Day

It can’t all be about race, can it? Even though House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa stands over his seated African-American Co-Chair and speaks to him like a house slave. It was mortifying to watch.

That Co-Chair, Maryland Rep- Elijah Cummings, had demanded the opportunity to speak at a hearing Issa had adjourned over his objections. If you think I’m over-reacting, watch it for yourself.

Monday, America’s Mayor abdicated his title, if he hadn’t already, as he described totalitarian Vladimir Putin as decisive, and “a leader” — as opposed to a dictator which is pretty much what he is. The drumbeat went on: John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Sarah Palin and the rest of them. But here’s Giuliani:

Then today. Here’s how the New York Times tells the story of the Debo Adegbile:

Debo Adegbile did his job, and for that he was deemed unfit by the Senate to become the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. His misstep, specifically, was helping represent a death-row inmate while he was director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

With this excuse in hand, Senate Republicans and seven cowardly Democrats, three of whom are up for re-election in November, managed to shut down Mr. Adegbile’s nomination. The final, shameful vote was effectively 51-48 (Senator Harry Reid supported Mr. Adegbile but voted no for procedural reasons).

But wait: didn’t the Senate vote to confirm John Roberts to the Supreme Court, even after learning that he, too, had assisted in the defense of a death-row inmate? That man, John Errol Ferguson, killed eight people. (Despite the help of one of the nation’s top lawyers, Ferguson was executed in Florida last year.)

So why does John Roberts get a pass but not Debo Adegbile? Because Mr. Adegbile represented Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1982 for killing a Philadelphia police officer named Daniel Faulkner. For three decades the case has reverberated across the region, which now apparently includes the constituency of Delaware Senator Chris Coons, the last and least expected Democratic vote against the nomination.

Even those who felt ambivalent about the Mumia case, one would hope, would want the accused to have a constitutionally-guaranteed defense, right? And no one questioned Mr. Adegbile’s capacity or experience, so he should have been fine. But no. A vicious FOX campaign planted the seed and it worked, even pulling in a few Democrats. They knew they were succumbing to demagoguery; they had to.

So at a time when voting rights are under challenge across the country without a full Voting Rights Act to protect them, at a time when a public figure can call the President of the United States a “subhuman mongrel,” and just keep going, when swing state early and weekend voting hours most used by timecard workers and students are eviscerated, when our first African-American President faces fierce obstruction for anything he proposes, we pretend we are behaving like the citizens we were meant to be. And aren’t.

Bad things happen all the time these days – but these three in such rapid succession were a real kick in the gut.

Lupita, the Oscars, Race and the Un-Funny (I’m Lookin’ at YOU Chelsea)

Mocking LUPITA? Really?

The presence of President Barack Obama has clearly given haters permission to go public. It’s given conservative politicians excuses to obstruct nominees and legislation almost to the point of treason. Today’s criticism of the president’s Ukraine responses, especially that of Senator Lindsey Graham, who knows better and seems to fear his primary opponent more than he fears adversely affecting our country’s future, is the latest example.

We expect that from the predictably-racist and from opportunistic politicians. We do NOT, however, expect it from mainstream comedians on mainstream outlets like The Huffington Post. So how does it happen that the much-honored Chelsea Handler, who has 5.4 million Twitter followers, her own nightly E! TV show, and is a frequent guest on others, feels free to:

a) Tweet what she did about African Americans and the Oscars (read this, you won’t believe it)

b) EVER believe these posts would be funny

c) Continue so long on such an influential venue without interruption by her “publisher?”

She is about to launch a stand-up tour and was tweeting to promote it, but in service to that end, repeatedly tweeted what were at least disrespectful and self-occupied and at most patently racist comments not only about Lupita Nyong’o’s win, but also about past Oscar winners Sidney Poitier and Angelina Jolie (who also received this year’s Humanitarian Award,) Whoopi Goldberg, and this: “#NelsonMandela looks great #abc #resurrection -Oscars –@chelseahandler” referring, presumably, to ABC’s endless promos for their new drama Resurrection.

As of this writing, there has been no searchable comment from HuffPo beyond a bland response to the Grio.

The thing is, as the only woman late-night anchor, an edgy humorist and all that stuff, her behavior is somehow especially painful. She’s reaching younger people and, with this kind of talk, making it a little easier for them to accept it from others. Because of the huge reach of HuffPo, she’s legitimized both by her presence and their silence.

So how is it, in the 5th year of the administration of our first Black president, when best picture, best screenplay and best supporting actress Oscars went to African-Americans, and, as Larry Irving has noted, “Who says Hollywood is stuck in the past… Mexican born Director wins for Best Director. British Born Brother wins for Best Picture… Kenyan born Yale educated woman wins for Best Supporting Actress… Love it!!! In America anything really can happen…” it is possible for this to happen and be almost solely in African-American outlets like The Grio and The Root?

Come on guys! Free speech, free press indeed. But we really need to speak up when this kind of thing is still acceptable as humor. Seriously.

Through the Looking Glass, 21st Century RFID-Style

iTunes stations2 Equation of the day: Cognitive dissonance = searching for travel accessories that will hold a passport and credit cards AND provide RFID protection AND go under one’s clothing — while at the same time listening to the “If You Like the Grateful Dead” Channel on iTunes Radio. OR I could switch to the Leonard Cohen one for the same result. I’m usually pretty good at avoiding over-60 vertigo but this…

We can’t take our laptops or iPhones overseas without the capacity to completely cut off data and email. Everything but text. The data pirates I first met all those years ago in Neuromancer are legion now, having moved from (fictionally) stealing corporate data to (really) pulling infinite amounts of information from our passports, phones, laptops and credit cards. At least the kind they use in Europe.

Pretty dark, and way beyond simple identity theft, right? Now available: where we’ve gone and for how long, what we’ve bought and from whom, phone calls, emails, passwords and personal information out there like a big buffet just waiting for them. As I listen to the music, I keep thinking of anthem-saturated marches, pot-scented dorm rooms, grey afternoons with the Sisters of Mercy and a vital, curious, well-educated self who could never have imagined, much less understood, our modern vulnerabilities. Even in the 90’s, with its “Information wants to be free” mantra didn’t prepare me for this.

A Quick Trip with Leonard Cohen

I can see the room. It’s a little scruffy and smells like pot and incense. (Yes that’s a cliche but there you are.) There’s a mattress on the floor, crazy Berkeley posters on the wall, a turntable and speakers, one window over the bed, another on the long wall. Lots of bookcases, record albums, a coffee grinder for stems and seeds, a big old stuffed chair, and us.

It was a long time ago. Hasn’t crossed my mind in years. Then, right there, on the Spotify singer-songwriter channel, comes a young Leonard Cohen singing this:

Music is dangerous. Suddenly I was back in Massachusetts almost half a century ago, when Suzanne, and Sisters of Mercy too, were part of my lexicon, along with everything from Milord

to Ruby Tuesday

to Blowin’ in the Wind.

Years ago Garry Trudeau published a Doonesbury thta included the line “You’ve stolen the sound track of my life!” I don’t remember the context but it’s disconcertinly accurate, as he usually is. Every song is a movie of the past, running — sometimes joyously, sometimes with enormous sadness, in my head.

It was such a different time, full of righteous anger and, at the same time, joy at being alive, sometimes in love, always part of the changes taking place all around us, many at our instigation.

Now, as we face the rage and disappointment of many of our children and their peers, it’s kind of heartbreaking to look back with such nostalgia at a time that they clearly see as debauched and destructive and, even worse, egocentric and selfish.

It’s paricularly hard when these songs rise up, so transporting. Everyone, if they’re lucky, has fond recollections of the younger times in their lives. But for me, as the music carries me there, it was so much more. Hope, freedom, equality, beauty, love and peace — every song an anthem moving us forward. And lovers in a scruffy dorm room, a little bit stoned, listening, and sometimes, singing along.

The Wolf of Wall Street: Greed, Sex, Cruelty and Martin Scorsese

I understand about Martin Scorsese. I really do. From Mean Streets to Taxi Driver, Raging Bull to Goodfellas to Boardwalk Empire, much of his work has been dark and violent. Decent people don’t show up very often and when they do, they seldom prevail, so when we went to see The Wolf of Wall Street this weekend, I wasn’t expecting a pleasant experience. I was not expecting what I got, either.

By the end of the film I was so angry I was shaking. After three hours of unrelenting greed, emotional violence, ruthlessness, the cynical exploitation of the weak, casually abusive and emotionless sex, indescribable disregard for and destructive treatment of women, it was tough to walk out of the theater without throwing something.

It was excess beyond anything that words could describe; images, sadly, are more successful. There’s nowhere to hide and there are so many moments where we wish we could.

I was a broadcast producer in the and 80’s and covered the excesses of that time. I knew that, in Bonfire of Vanities, Tom Wolfe was demonstrating his skills as a reporter as well as a novelist.

Even so, the rank, brittle ugliness of this film, of these people and of the fact that much of the story really happened turned what we know into what we wish we didn’t. The criticism by the daughter of one of its main characters, that it glamorizes the Belfort universe and makes them some sorts of rakish sweetie pies wasn’t what I saw. The are all reprehensible from first to last.

Of course the film wouldn’t have had the impact it did if it hadn’t been so well-made. Its impact is indisputable. Even so – maybe his next undertaking, after all this darkness, will bring us the Scorsese behind The Last Waltz and Concert for New York City. After all, they say music tames the savage beast, and in this film, he certainly unleashed a hell of a creature.

To Letty and Marlo with Thanks: My Free to Be Grandson

My grandson Nate turned two yesterday. He loves music. And, a child of his era, music video. We are avid watchers of Free to Be…You and Me clips.

This morning, this song, and the others, ran on a loop in my mind as I walked passed strollers and playgrounds in the park. Not for the first time, I was overcome with gratitude to the two of you and the others who brought these songs to what is literally now generations of children. It was a major factor in our home when our boys were little; it was even the school play at their elementary school. Now it belongs to their children. And, I suspect, those who follow.

It's become my go-to baby present to young families who don't already know it – and sometimes to those who do. And, within a few bars Glad to Have a Friend Like You or When We Grow Up, can bring me to tears.

It's everything we wished for our kids when they were little – all of us; it's a myriad of memories of all the hours we spent loving, dancing to and singing these wonderful songs as they became part of us.

And so I presume, for all the moms and dads, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers and teachers and friends — to thank you one more time, as I enter the third year of the second generation in our family to be "free to be."

Glad to have a friend like you!

iVillage Heard Women’s Voices Before Anybody Else Knew How to Listen

Women need tribes. Need each other.

Two of the first online people to figure that out were Nancy Evans and Candace Carpenter Olson, the co-founders, along with two others, of iVillage. Together they built the best online home women will ever have. Parent Soup, where I worked for four years, was a mommy site before mommy bloggers or Babble or BlogHer. Vibrant, warm and well-led, it served – and listened to – women with inclusiveness and respect.

Well before blogs or social media, iVillage's topical message boards, conceived as support communities like those in AA, engaged the site's visitors and provided a sense of home and ownership that didn't seem to appear anywhere else online. They shared parenting and relationship advice and once, right before my eyes, rescued a woman from a terribly abusive relationship as all the members of the board came together to support her.

Today we learned the site will "be shuttered" and folded into the TODAY SHOW Online under its current owner, NBC News.

It's sad. To get an idea of how wonderful it was to be part of what we created there, consider the deluge of comments that followed a single post earlier today. All of us are, I suspect, as surprised as I am at the depth of emotion this news has evoked. We were all so proud to be part of what we knew was a remarkable creation. And we learned so much.

My own first assignment was to design an education site for parents. (The logo for "Education Central" appears at the top of this post.) I took the initial outline to Nancy, who was Editor-in-Chief. Looking up from her desk, she asked "Have you looked at the message boards?" I shook my head. "Well go read the message boards, use what you find there, and then bring me what you have" she said. She wouldn't even look at it I did that, and she was right.

Rule one: listen to the community. There was so much within those conversations that revealed what should appear on the site. I've been preaching that lesson ever since.

iVillage believed in its communities, in their hearts and minds. It gave countless women voices they would never have otherwise had and paved the way for the powerful women bloggers who have emerged after them.

Its leaders also believed in us, from novices to old hands like me, and in our mission: give women a home online and hear what they say there. Believe, more than anything, in them.