Elaine Benes. Nineties feminist icon. Terrible dancer. Urban sombrero-wearer. Sponge-worthy decider and a no bullshit-giver-or-taker. In one Seinfeld episode, Elaine gets asked by her friends, Beth and Arnie, to be a character reference in their adoption case. She lets it slip with the agency officer that once when they were all at a movie, Arnie…
Read More
The father squatted down on the patch of mud and dead grass. The little boy, maybe five or six, stood beside him, watching closely as his father pushed the metal legs of the stand into the soft earth, which in January should have been bedrock. The father straightened up, stepped back, placed his hands on…
Read More
At first it seems like the three women are just hanging out in the middle of the Commonwealth Ave. mall—a quiet, tree-lined promenade that runs like an artery through the heart of Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. Abigail Adams, Phillis Wheatley, and Lucy Stone appear as life-size bronze statues, posed around large granite blocks. Quotes from…
Read More
This week has me thinking about fish and alligators and other scaly, prehistoric creatures, and that’s not just because I’ve had Mitch “Squid-in-a-Turtle-Neck-Face” McConnell and Orrin “Crypt-Keeper’s-Less-Handsome-Brother” Hatch popping up all over my social media. It’s because I’ve got evolution on the brain. I’m imagining what it must have been like for the first pre-fish…
Read More