Tag: Margot Adler

Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Cancer, Courage and Rage

Cancer has taken so many people I’ve loved and admired. This new interview with two hugely admired and much-loved celebrities reminded me of how deeply it affects us all .  We know, in our heads, that the presence of beauty, courage, fame and an amazing marriage and family can’t keep the monster at bay.  Neither can being the most respected broadcast journalist of the past 30 years; Tom Brokaw had cancer too.  So did my husband, by the way.  Thankfully, they are still with us.  But it’s a roll of the dice, not fame or fortune, or even education, that’s made it so.

So why are we not all enraged?  Why do we refuse to keep this plague at (or at least near) the top of our agenda?  We face so much right now: attacks on women, racial tension, income inequality, climate change, declining education systems and infrastructure – fill in your own particular blank.  But no matter how we feel about any of these issues, we all grieve for those we’ve lost to cancer; we all long for their presence in our lives and know that it is just a lack of knowledge that took them from us.

No family is untouched; the lucky ones face it among older members but so many lose loved ones — family and friends, well before they’ve seen their children grow up, or get married or find their way in the world and before they’ve exhausted the gifts that brought so much to all of us.  I’ve been thinking about them a great deal recently, and have felt, for some time, a need to honor them once again here.  Many died before there was an Internet but I’ve added links where I could.

We were young journalists together:

Margot Adler

Mary Halleron

Mark Harrington

Joan Shorenstein

Teachers, mentors, friends:

Ed Bradley

Ed Hornick

Eden Lipson

Maggie Morton

Susan Neibur 

The Dearest:

Laurie Becklund

Bob Squier

 

 

 

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.