Tag: new york city

Read More hand holding a bottle of Manischewitz wine

Camp (It’s a Mitzvah!)

It is 1982. I just turned 14 last month. It is the summer before 10th grade. I am at a sleepaway camp in the Catskills. I am staying in what used to be a hotel that the camp randomly assigns to campers. It’s not fancy, but it’s better than the cabins. It’s really cool because I am with a group of girls from Long Island. It’s like they are a gang of Rizzos from Grease.

Pumpkin, Spice, Naughty, and Nice

If Christian girlies who love the fall season truly knew and embraced that their bescarved, twinkly-eyed glee comes at the behest of many who suffered brutal deaths, or that their Target scarves were forcibly made by Indonesian children for less than a dollar a day, would they smile so big when sipping those tasty PSLs?

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Frijoles Negros al Indios

But you cannot pick around home. Maybe your home, but not my home. I can throw the doors wide–and often do so with open arms–but to refuse a beam–whether it be a corpulent bird or a hi hat trill–is to cripple such a font to its foundation. For it comes from the depths of my soul, indivisible and not mine, but inherited slowly over time with no recipe to speak of, only a dance rediscovered over and over with folkish steps, a memory recognized when lived out with abandon. I cannot choose what bubbles up from this stew.

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Circles and Rectangles

I feel like Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when he is struck by the Seurat painting, except there’s no John Hughes movie soundtrack in the back, and I fail to fall into the painting the way Cameron does. The pressure to discern meaning increases when other people are nearby. I’m afraid that they see something I can’t.