Dearest Readers of This Blog:
I am late out of the gate with this post due to marrying a Catholic with a large family who takes Easter seriously (I did not know this going in), and a flat tire on the Palisades Interstate Parkway at approx mile 3.5. All of the usual things happened: a man, resembling a serial killer stopped to help. The flat bed tow truck driver relieved of us $40 in what was, to all, an obvious scam.
This morning a NYT article on David Remnick was puffier than my pillow. He takes the subway! He makes time every day to chat with the little people! He writes lovely thank you notes! He gets up at 5:30 am to start writing and, after he puts the kids to sleep, he burns the midnight. Just want to say, for the record: I do all that. And I would go man to man with him on thank you notes. Mine perfectly drip with sincerity and ass-licking cant so subtle and sublime you might think I actually cared. Oh, and one other difference, small, I don’t run The New Yorker. That.
Filed under: Media |
Betsy Lerner 
Your daughter’s Jewish AND Catholic? So which way does she prefer her guilt?
I love your blog. I prefer it over the Resurrection any day.
Wonder who will write “The Years with Remnick”? No doubt someone incredibly interested.
Hopefully she is part Irish and Italian too, that will complete the perfect guilt storm!
40 bucks seems pretty good, even if it were here in Tulsa. What exactly did he do for the 40 bucks?
You need to take photos of these events, by the way! Camera phone.
He’s like one of those ridiculous Perfect Mommy-types. You know at least one: she has adorable, well-behaved children who LOVE vegetables; an immaculate house; a sexy, loving husband who brings home a fat slab of bacon and built the kids an amazing treehouse; she lost all her pregnancy weight and has the cutest outfits that would look clownish on anyone else. Oh, and her hair always has that ‘fresh from the salon’ shine and bounce. Yesssssss, we hates her, we do.
Thrilled that you addressed the Remnick piece – I thought of you when I read it and wondered what your take on him with be. And then I got back to my own writing, shamed that I was procrastinating again by reading the Times….
I’ve resigned myself to useless comments today whose only purpose is to let the author know I laughed.
I laughed.
Thanks.
Believe it or not, there is such a thing as WASP guilt. I think my mother might have invented it or at least approved of it.
Love the title of today’s post:
“Let’s hear it for New York / concrete jungle where dreams are made of / there’s nothing you can’t do / I love New York!”
(I always use proper MLA format when quoting Jay-Z and Alicia Keys 🙂
Great to have you back Betsy. You’ve put a big smile on my face once again. Never would have guessed that you were stuck on the Palisades for Easter. So you didn’t mean those lovely, sincere notes you sent me so long ago? You could have fooled me! (I guess you did.)
Sherry, the difference between Catholic guilt and Jewish guilt is: with Catholic guilt, you burn in hell for having sex; but with Jewish guilt, hell is RIGHT NOW for not going home on Passover.
I’m still stuck on the topic of “Things We Didn’t Know Going Into Our Marriage.” In my ex-marriage, I didn’t know ahead of time about the “Handshake of Friendship” at the Catholic Church. This cheery little handshake moment was alien to me as a Jew (of course, being in a church was pretty alien too) since my experience was only of sitting in synagogues with my mother as she muttered imprecations in Yiddish under her breath.