You are not listening to me. If a guy so much as talks to me, I’ll bite his head off. Or worse. The day after my college boyfriend dumped me, back in New York and depleted from non-stop tears, I had called my friend to pour out my woes. Rather than indulging my heartbreak, however,…
Read MoreAudrey Jean Palmer
December 17, 1935 – January 7, 2023 Audrey grew up in a small house that looked across Lake Union to the Seattle skyline when the Space Needle was tall. Her dad, Roy Ward, was a tugboat captain for Pioneer Gravel, so some summers she spent dressing paperdolls on his tugboat, which made trips between Seattle…
Read MoreOne Flew Out of the Cuckoo’s Nest
Last week I sprang my mom from a memory care facility we’d like to forget. Turns out her dementia was transient, stroke-related. As she started to recover, her cognitively impaired neighbors made her increasingly insane, which I think would happen to any of us if strangers barged into our rooms during the night or if…
Read MoreJeffrey Epstein and Jean-Luc Brunel
The semester begins tomorrow but rather than preparing for my students, I’m reading about the horror that was Jeffrey Epstein and his consorts, one of whom, I saw in the news last night, was my French modeling agent, Jean-Luc Brunel. In the fall of 1982, I was a 19-year old fledgling model in New York…
Read MoreThe Marchesa de Sade
Talk about burying the lede. His profile described the languages he speaks (French, Italian, Spanish, English) and his intellectual pursuits. Only in the last line did it mention his desire to be dominated. I could do that, I thought to myself. “Francois” seemed smart and interesting, and he was cute enough. My therapist had recently…
Read MoreIn Praise of Ghosting
I was supposed to have a lunch date today at a casual place with an amazing view, a restaurant made of shipping containers midway between the two of us on Treasure Island. Alas, no treasure was to be found today in the shipping container restaurant for him or for me. Mr. Oakland and I had…
Read MoreDon Juan and the Feast with Broccoli
After we’d been dating for six months, the first person I met online informed me that he wasn’t looking for a relationship. When I pointed out that his profile was, indeed, seeking a long-term relationship, he laughed at my naiveté. He had to say he wanted a LTR, he explained. Otherwise, he would get hit…
Read MoreA Picture Of J. Dorian Gray
Standing in no man’s land, he texted. One block away, I replied. When I got to the steamy Korean restaurant, however, no one on the sidewalk matched his Match photographs, neither the damp, bedraggled partiers outside the liquor store nor the hipsters waiting for seats at the wine bar next door. The address I’d texted…
Read MorePride and Prejudice?
It is a truth universally to be acknowledged that a middle-aged woman in possession of a fortune* is not in want of a spouse. What she wants is a partner, companionship, sex. Two of the three may be provided by friends, but the third is more complicated. On the one hand (pun intended), technological advances…
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