My husband and I went to Boston for the weekend for a friend’s surprise birthday party. I used to go to Boston for the weekend all the time when I was in my teens and 20s. What a strong pull it exerted then: all those smart students swarming the umpteen colleges, including my sister at […]
Small Pleasures of a Long Marriage I asked my husband: Cumulus and cirrus, but what’s the third one? Thromboid, he replied. Immaculate Conception On a wall in our bedroom in a wooden frame hangs a photograph of Gus the neurotic polar bear, who spent his life swimming from one side of his tank in
Valentine’s Day poems Read More »
The well-made theater at Hudson Guild hides unassumingly inside the Community Center in the NYCHA Elliott-Chelsea Houses on West 26th Street. It has professional lights and sound booth, a deep and well-proportioned stage, men’s and women’s dressing rooms, 100 comfortable orange upholstered seats, and not a bad sight line in the house. I didn’t know
My Season with Hudson Guild, by Michele Herman Read More »
Not all that long ago, an editor at a website that covers green architecture and sustainable design called me about doing some writing for them. We had a pleasant conversation, and then, before saying goodbye, I asked for her phone number. Awkward pause. Just use this number, she said. Awkward pause. I’m on a landline
My Appless Life, by Michele Herman Read More »
Let’s talk shampoo, a conversation that I think is long overdue. For years I bought mine from Arrojo, a local salon, in jumbo plastic containers. The products had none of the bad stuff—parabens, phthalates, synthetic fragrances—and I figured one big container uses less plastic than several smaller ones. Then the algorithm started to feed me
“A Sustainable Village” figures out zero waste, by Michele Herman Read More »
In 1984 I took an oddball part-time summer job with a company that created newspaper indexes. My first task every morning was to call an obscure office at The New York Times. How many dots? I would ask. The voice on the other end would give me a number ranging from zero to four, and
When newspapers were big and indexing was done by people, by Michele Herman Read More »
Spring 2025. I head over to the median strip of West Street at Christopher to participate in a small weekly “action” I’ve just learned about. I choose a hand-lettered sign from the organizer’s bag that reads HONK IF YOU LOVE DEMOCRACY. For the first time since elementary school, someone hands me a tambourine. Goldilocks-like, I’ve
Going where the protest suits my clothes, by Michele Herman Read More »
When I was a kid, I had a dream, a wonderful dream. I would dress up in my parents’ clothes or my toy-store tutu, bound into my parents’ bedroom, fling open my arms, yell ta-da and do a little song and dance. Before long, shyness and trouble singing on key knocked the budding entertainer right
Sometimes a writer has to act too, by Michele Herman, photos by Peter Yesley Read More »
The kid working the counter at my local West Village hardware store had an unlit cigarette in his mouth the whole time I picked his brain about the silver-plate wearing off our flatware. This was a year or so after I innocently used the liquid dip-it silver polish after a lifetime of the pasty kind
Could our national corrosion have started with the silverware? by Michele Herman Read More »
I’m aware that some people cringe at the thought of attending a literary reading. Otherwise sophisticated people have even been known to sneer at the very term reading, particularly when prefaced with poetry, in that voice Giuliani used when he described Obama as a community organizer. But hear me out. Readings—prose, poetry or both; with
Don’t overlook book readings for a good night out Read More »
