Is it possible that I am in denial? If my mother hadn't persuaded my father to go to the YMCA that morning, if she hadn't reminded him that he always felt better when he exercised, and besides the next day,…

I deny anything that brings me pain….accuse me of denial? Nope…. I deny that! See what I did there? It’s two years since my dear ex husband and close forever friend Paul died of a rapid rabid lung cancer and…

See what I did there? I’m denying denying….and therein lies the tale of my life.

I’ve been living in the Santa Cruz Mountains for fifteen years now, in a proper mountain town nestled between Redwood City and Palo Alto to the southeast, and Half Moon Bay to the northwest. La Honda’s defining features include a…

I've never felt like a very positive person. Maybe it's my nature. I seem to have a very strong negativity bias. Also, though, when I was a girl I learned that it was better to expect the worst to happen…

And I mean years. In 1989, after working for five years to make it happen, I produced and directed a feature-length dramatic film, Thousand Pieces of Gold, about a Chinese woman brought to the US as a slave and brought…

His name was Gary Gardinier, he was my best friend. We shared everything, including Diane McMillan's breasts. We were about twelve years old then. Diane lived across the street from me, she was a year or two older. I was…

Last Saturday, I walked 6.2 miles with my friend Colleen for Story Summit, called "Walk for Story." I also brought my ukulele along and played a couple of Beatles songs because I was "Team Beatles" from the musical Across the…

They were two people getting into a car under the bright lights of Times Square. They were very drunk. We were fascinated, being twelve years old and country bumpkins. When the confrontation started with the driver and the police came,…

"Are they drunk?" "I think so, they're pretty messed up." Gary and I were in Times Square, the year was 1958, we were twelve years old. I t was a few minutes past midnight in March. We had traveled to…

....But my defensiveness started to fall away as soon as Harper and Will left NYC, because that’s when I started to recognize that Harper’s apprehension and fear of rejection were not that different from that of so many other marginalized…