On the Home Front

Glad to catch up with you and - thanks for your report.

Are you sure you mean it when you ask what I am doing ?

All right  - you asked.

Talking with my dear childhood friend Betsy every week is an important connection for me - - 

we keep up with the state of the world today, 

drop back to the past we share 

and then just go on blabbing about anything that comes up.

Are you, like me, very grateful for Alexander Graham Bell and his telephone - even though - who dreamed we would be carrying it in our pockets?  Maybe Dick Tracey - he was a prophet on that score.

Sorry to say I am taking a pass on the FRINGE this year after eight consecutive seasons. It was a tough decision for me. I LOVE introducing a story at the Fringe -  

My original plan was to introduce a new WWI show at the Fringe - but now I will be introducing it in November in Charlotte,NC where it started. Its a family story about my grand uncle and his mother.  The WWI doughboy buried in France is from Charlotte and November 2 will be the 100th anniversary of his death during the War. 

His mother, a Gold Star Mother, visited his grave in 1930. 

Sponsored by the Olde Mecklenburg Genealogical Society I will tell that story. Probably November 9. I feel as though I am bringing him home.

In a way I will bring him home. I am placing a Centopath Stone in Elmwood Cemetery on the family plot with his parents and other family members.

Tom Wolfe says you can't go home again - - -- what has been made clear to me - is that you can go back where you were once "at home" but its not exactly the same . I am very grateful to Obie Osborne, a Central High School classmate and Marilyn Hall Jones, a cousin who is a member of the OMGS for helping to make this happen.

Saturday I had a great time at a workshop on writing monologues and dialogue. It was good stuff for writers and also just plain fun. It was a cold rainy day.  We were meeting in a 19th century small and livable, once-a-church, house in College Park across from the University of Maryland campus.  I was the oldest in the 20 mixed age group of men and women -  strangers to me -  gathered around a huge table talking and laughing all day. We had 2  excellent leaders, author Mary Amato and playwright John Feffer. I am ready to go again. Being wrapped in laughter felt medicinal.

For Valentine's my daughter Karen and I are going to a play - "HAND-BAGGED".  It is running an additional month at the Round HouseTheater in Bethesda which says a lot!

The cast is small - two characters performed by four women - 2 as Queen Elizabeth - young and older - and 2 as Margaret Thatcher - young and older. They talk from the four perspectives.  Sounds intriguing doesn't it? I will be paying attention to the dialogue and monologues.

Well, that's it for me today.

Love to all of you!!!