Surabhi Shah at Harvard U

I really am glad that I went to hear Surabhi Shah.  Wicked sick but the stories were so good I was totally  lost in a world not my own.  I hope I did not infect anyone. I was infected by the magic of the stories that has stayed with me.

Because people actually LIKE to do good things...

What is this phenom all about? Is it mysterious? Is it a good thing or bad? Neither. Perhaps it is simply a neutral fact that humans like to do energetic things together. There, is that neutral enough to be true? And this is why these screens that connect us do not and will never completely replace the wonder of live music, story and theater.

Filmed on MARCH 6th in Times Square, NYC. Thanks Laura P for pointing me to this.

Hey Jude Times Square Subway Station from 39forks on Vimeo.

what we need to do...

"Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes you must do what is required."
- Winston Churchill

Yeah, what he said.

What is required? As a teenager I angsted over how to leave the world a bit better than I found it. As a woman of an "age certain" I am now sorry very to see what scant success we,that is, my generation has made. And what a mucking fess we are leaving to our children. But we are not "shuffled off this mortal coil yet." So...what is required of us? What can we do to halt nuclear madness, be it nuclear power or nuclear weapons? How will we stop the ravaging acts of violence between humans and the swiftly escalating degradation of our physical world? What is required? This my deep and abiding question,today.

Love and Lies is next story slam. A contribution...

"Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth..."

But our love has had a long run. Somehow, I couldn't resist making this and posting it too. It was our 29th anniversary yesterday and we spent it at church in the morning, where I was the substitute preacher and then Robert had clients to see and I wanted to go to an open comedy mic- something I had never done. It was at The Comedy Kitchen a new venue organized by Liz Appleby. Since I was already video taping for the other performers, I let the camera run while I was on. When I showed this to Robert he laughed and said..."Go ahead, you can let people see it." I went from the serious and sacred words on the pulpit to the profane, in a swift dive. And I didn't need to be pushed.



There are some inaccuracies, in the heat of the moment - he was separated for 2.5 years when we started "going out" and he went to graduate school on more than a whim but that is another story.

No More Taking Sides, An Israeli-Palestinian Story

An amazing program to hear this morning as Robert and I drove home, right after I filled in as substitute minister and preached the sermon at the Sherborn UU Church. SOF: Production Credits | No More Taking Sides, An Israeli-Palestinian Story This is a long video - you can just listen to it in the background if you like...the other two videos are short
but so powerful http://vimeo.com/9579415
http://vimeo.com/9579070 wish I had heard this BEFORE I preached.

No More Taking Sides from Speaking of Faith on Vimeo.

mambo italiano - it's my street name

I like to be silly and here is a link with proof positive that I know how...

Family Stories and memoirs and the 1st Slam in Cambridge

What does the popularity of memoirs tell us about ourselves? by Daniel Mendelsohn

Great article in the New Yorker about telling true life stories and memory.  Some wonderful quotes and issues to think about... “Outwardly,” Freud [wrote] “my life has passed calmly and uneventfully and can be covered by a few dates.” Inwardly—and who knew better?—things were a bit more complicated: 'A psychologically complete and honest confession of life, on the other hand, would require so much indiscretion (on my part as well as on that of others) about family, friends, and enemies, most of them still alive, that it is simply out of the question. What makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity.'

Mendelsohn goes on to say that memoir has not been taken very seriously by literary critics;

"Unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupçon of meretriciousness: memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family. Like a drunken guest at a wedding, it is constantly mortifying its soberer relatives (philosophy, history, literary fiction)—spilling family secrets, embarrassing old friends—motivated, it would seem, by an overpowering need to be the center of attention."  Read more:

But the phenomenon of the story slam is also related to this cultural trend and even though massmouth is  navigating a river feed by that stream I am sure we only partly understand the nature of our success. Here is a great article on the most recent  massmout story slam:  http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/features/x1103041274/Where-prose-glows-Cambridge-s-first-story-slam-hits-Enormous-Room