Hollywood is a very very strange terrain to navigate. Some actors who worked steadily as children and teens are able to spend the rest of their lives in their profession, like Hayley Mills (the original star of the show when it was “Good Morning, Miss Bliss) or Jodie Foster; others say, “That was fun, but I’m having a …

My husband had similar feelings of malaise for some months, was wheezing, finally went to a pulmonary specialist and found he had a malignant tumor in between his lungs, thus inoperable. He did chemo and radiation but was gone in a little over a year, not yet 60. As my birthdays rack up I am grateful for every one.

Plus whatever is on the random tissue or handtowel you grab to de-fog the windshield. I don’t know who is getting *grease* on the inside of the windshield (eating a lot of french fries in the car?), but I often get frost on the inside of mine. I can scrape it off (with my greasy fingernails) but then it stands to…

I only read the books after they’ve been dramatized, so I spent the last few evenings reading Nemesis Games up to where they left off in episode 9. Even though I had just watched it, it was still a nail-biter. The point to having the crew separated for the entire book/season is that they keep asking themselves, What…

Two of my recent reads: “Wolf in White Van” by John Darnielle. I read it in two days. “Little House on the Prairie” — no, really. If you haven’t read it, it’s not just a cute story. A book of short stories, any genre: you can read half a dozen pages and feel you’ve completed something, and if you don’t like a story…

What bothers me about that is not the message itself, as I’ve known some very intellectual men who seldom read anything, but the way it’s expressed. In my opinion, “Don’t waste your time on someone who thinks vulgarity is wit.”

No, I didn’t like “The Great Gatsby” either, but so many books are often not suitable for reading by teenagers, albeit almost everthing I read back then was an adult novel. You may be unimpressed by a book at 16 and deeply impressed by it at 40.

Definitely not a knockoff. It was based on Larry McMurtry’s 1966 novel. Memories, but not nostalgia. It’s the role I always remember her for. On Dancing With the Stars she was terrible, but so much fun! Every actor should have a career like hers.

What’s the earliest TV show you remember watching?

I have been addicted to this show since the beginning but have carefully never read ahead in the books except to finish them as they correspond to each season. This season I’m finding Bull strangely appealing - must be my age.

He didn’t say that Russian Orthodox choir music gives a “strange feeling of  space and sexuality” but “space and sacrality”.

I meant 65 years.

“I Married Joan”?! With Jim Backus and Joan Somebody? It’s been 55 years and I can still sing the theme song!

I was present when my first husband died. A few hours later I slept next to him because I would never get another chance. He wasn’t stiffening for about 12 hours. On a CSI episode a woman spent the night next to a man who had died and I was annoyed when one of the technicians made a crack about the smell. There wasn’t…

Reading “Magic for the Resistance” by Michael Hughes, who created the “Bind Trump” spell. It isn’t too late to utilize some magic/prayer along with concrete action.

On a more Sunday-morning note, there is a beautiful children’s book entitled “The Donkey’s Dream” by Barbara Helen Berger, illustrating what is flowing through the sleepy mind of the donkey carrying Mary to Bethlehem: images of a fountain, a city, a rose, other symbols of the Virgin Mary. Check it out on the next…

Back before most of us were born, even me, the Soviets used to erase people who had fallen from grace from photographs, documents, public life. They became “non-persons.” Make him a non-person in your own life if you want, as he is in mine, but don’t change reality just because it was ugly. I still wince every time I…

A museum, I can understand. Cute little hatchet cookies — I hope they’re not serious.

My fridge has a door handle so I usually hook the dish towel through there. I’ve seen bathrooms larger than my kitchen, so a separate hamper isn’t going to happen.

It was such a harrowingly great book that I really never want to see it portrayed on the screen.