This and That by JL

This week’s post is by guest blogger Mary Alice Franklin, Communications Manager & ArtsNews Editor at ArtsWestchester.  Her article about ArtsWestchester’s recent Guerrilla Girls event was originally published in The Huffington Post:  The art protest group Guerrilla Girls​ recently performed in front of a packed, yet intimate, crowd in Westchester, NY. A stage sat in ArtsWestchester’s gallery, appropriately surrounded by its SHE: Deconstructing […]

My grandmother could have been a famous chef. But that wasn’t happening in the early 1900s when Margit landed at Ellis Island with a head filled with Hungarian recipes. These weren’t recipes she memorized from a cookbook, but recipes she devised from the memory of the taste of her mother’s cooking. When she married my grandfather, […]

Laurel Garcia Colvin has a room of her own at ArtsWestchester – both literally and figuratively.  It is a blue and white girly confection fit for a princess, with wallpaper and fabric that mimic traditional toile patterns. The installation is presented as one of the provocative works of art in an exhibition entitled SHE: Deconstructing […]

                  It snowed all the way up to Albany. It poured on the way back home. We went there in spite of the weather, as we had many times in the past.  We went to talk about the arts, it’s importance to our Empire State and the […]

                Feminists are in huge demand this year. Bernie wants them. Hillary wants them.  So does The Donald, Ted and Mario.  They are not in short supply these days so much as they are now specialty groups, segmented by age, ethnicity, income, education, and then on down to […]

Recently, I tried to find myself within all the election clutter.  Where do I belong, I wondered.  I tuned into CNN to surf the category that best describes me. Neither a Democrat nor a Republican, I suppose I am an independent thinker. Female? Yes. Phew. That was easy. Neither a liberal nor a conservative. Not […]

This is a very simple bit of prose. It has no earth-shattering, moral lesson.  It’s just a simple story about how potatoes saved my life when I was a teenager at Far Rockaway High School. Recently, I was reminded of it while observing the usual stresses of adolescence now that my granddaughters are teenagers. No […]

Women are an interesting lot. Like Sinatra sang in South Pacific, “There is nothing like a dame.” His was a sexualized version of what it means to be a woman. In truth however, there is nothing like a dame… or, more precisely speaking, nothing like a woman. Call the species what you will… women are […]