Yesterday morning, I stood at the entranceway to our living room and surveyed the damage. There were stacks of books and magazines on the coffee table, tumbles of blankets on the couch, a smattering of empty mugs with used tea bag strings dangling over their rims. My abandoned crutches were leaning on the door, my physical therapy CPM machine on the floor.
Two weeks after my hip surgery I can finally walk without assistance.
This, unfortunately, means I can clean as well.
It’s fine. I like it actually. It’s very cathartic after two weeks of being absolutely still.
Shannon, my insane boyfriend and exceptional caretaker, has taken the weekend off to run a marathon in Niagara. He’s an ultra runner.
This marathon is 100 miles. ONE HUNDRED MILES. I know. I think the same thing.
“Named for the mythical winged horse that carried thunderbolts for the Greek God Zeus, Pegasus Café has a classic pristine feeling.”
The Help surprised some people that Southern whites could
treat their servants with so much inhumanity in the 1960's. I was
shocked by a few specific incidents, but not surprised. I saw it close
up as a child. Not in Jackson, Miss., where the story is set, but in my
hometown of Beverly Hills where the help was almost exclusively
'negro,' before the Black Power Movement and the influx of Hispanic
housekeepers and nannies in the late 70's and early 80's.
We had just started Saturday Night Live, I was an apprentice writer, 24 years old and I felt intimidated. Chevy was hysterically funny. So was John and Danny and Gilda and Franken. And Michael O’Donoghue, well, Michael O’Donoghue simply scared the shit out of me. So I stayed pretty much to myself. One day I came to work, and on my desk was a framed cartoon. A drawing – no caption – of a drunken rabbi staggering home late and holding a wine bottle. And waiting for him on the other side of the door was his angry wife, getting ready to hit him with a Torah instead of a rolling pin. I had no idea who put it there. I started looking around and out of the corner of my eye I saw a white-haired man in his office, laughing. He had put it there. That was the first communication I had with Herb Sargent– which was significant given that he never spoke and he gave me a cartoon that had no caption. 
I had seen him years before. Or at least I think I did. When I was a kid. My father manufactured jewelry and he had his shop on 52nd Street between Fifth and Madison. I used to come into the city from Long Island and run errands for him during the summer. And no matter where the delivery was supposed to go, I made sure I got there by going through the lobby of what was then called the RCA Building, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, with the hopes that maybe I would see Johnny Carson (whose show was upstairs) or some of the people from That Was the Week That Was: Buck Henry, Bob Dishy, David Frost – or Herb Sargent, who was the producer. I knew his name from the credits. As a young boy who wanted to be a TV writer some day, this was like hanging around outside of Yankee Stadium waiting to see the players going through to the clubhouse. 
There’s no question my husband loves his daughter, his dog and me – and no question, in that order – but he is not sentimental. He’s got his moments – as in, let’s dump my high school notes, let’s save his 80′s matchbooks – but on the whole, what Greg likes best is the ca-chunk of the recycling bin. Or better yet, the trash.