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uchihacore · 4 years

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newton’s third law

PAIRING: keishin ukai x reader SUMMARY: every action has an equal and opposite reaction WARNINGS: nsfw, pegging, blowjobs

You frown at your reflection in the tiny rearview mirror, rubbing at the edge of a purple mark peeking out of your shirt collar. You hadn’t noticed it last night, but then again, you hadn’t really noticed much outside of Keishin calling you ‘Princess’ as he sat you in his lap and pressed a vibrator between your legs. And really, can you fault yourself for that?

Lucky for you (or rather for lucky for Keishin), you always carry a tube concealer in your purse, just for these types of situations. You pull out the tube and dab some concealer onto your tender neck, gently patting away the cream until it blends with the rest of your skin.

“Sorry 'bout that,” Keishin says from the passenger seat. You can see him from the corner of your eye, and he’s grinning like an idiot, which makes sense because he is an idiot.

“No, you aren’t,” you scoff, rolling your eyes. You need to get him out of your car before he makes you late for work, or worse, a student sees you with him. You pack the tube away, pulling out your lipgloss as Keishin shrugs unapologetically.

“Nope, not even a little bit. But really,” he says, leaning in closer until you can feel his breath on your ear, “can you blame me? Seeing you all marked up, having to hide my hickeys at school, it’s so hot.”

“Nice to know you’re turning into a caveman, Keishin,” you say. And blush because the heater is on and not because of how close he is, the bruise on your neck tingling, “but not everyone gets the luxury of working for our mommy. Some of us have real jobs.”

(Which, admittedly, is a low blow. Especially considering he coaches the boys’ volleyball team for practically nothing, and gives Karasuno students discounts on like half his inventory.) You purse your lips together to rub in the lipgloss, fighting back an apology.

“And yet, here you are,” Keishin notes, seemingly unruffled. “Hiding my artful love-bites under a layer of makeup. Real job and all.”

“Get lost, Keishin,” you say, rolling your eyes. You toss your lipgloss into your makeup bag and turn to him. “I have classes to teach.”

“Of course you do. Have a good day at work, Princess.” he says, and the ballsy bastard actually kisses you before getting out of your car. You give him your best-unimpressed glare, and his smile widens when he turns and sees your expression before heading into the store.

And okay, yeah, maybe you a part of you is blushing and giggling on the inside like some idiot schoolgirl, but only because you’ve been treated like many things in your lifetime, from bitch to queen to child, but no one had ever made you feel like the Keishin does, like an actual, honest to God, princess.

But the other part is trying to figure out when he got so cocky, and how you’d allowed that to happen. Before you can contemplate further, a group of third-year students passes your car, and you put the car back into drive. Suddenly self-aware of how strange you must look mooning after the Sakanoshita Store guy, of all people.

You ponder it on the walk to your classroom, your sex life, or whatever it’s called, with Keishin Ukai is excellent, you’ll be the first to admit. He’s the first man ever to make your voice hoarse from moaning. But the last thing you want is for him to get a big head over it. He’s annoying enough as it is, thanks.

No, you need to get Keishin back down to Earth, somehow. He needs to be taught a lesson, taken down a peg.

And just like that, it hits you. Throwing a glance at your class, who are all too busy with morning pleasantries to notice, you pull out your phone and do a quick google search, you find the article you’re looking for and skim it. You’ll need to do some after-school shopping, but you’ll gladly sacrifice that cute skirt from H&M for this. You put your phone away and neatly write a line of notes about the kinematics on the chalkboard, drawing a smug little smiley face in the corner. Oh, this is going to be fun.

Your next 'meeting’ (because what the fuck else are you supposed to call it?) with Keishin is on Friday, and today is Tuesday. If you stop at the sex shop tonight and get the supplies, you’ll have two nights to figure them out. Which is essential because the last thing you want is to be unskilled in front of Keishin. He’d never shut up about it.

The school day passes by in a blur. You faintly remember scolding Nishinoya for using Tanaka as a springboard and a brief conversation with Hinata about the ‘epic highs and lows of high school volleyball’. Also, the concept of mitochondrial DNA had been clunking around your headspace for most of the day which was odd because you don’t even teach biology. Still, mostly you were just focused on the tantalizing idea of giving Keishin a taste of his own medicine.

You drive to the sex shop two towns over, as opposed to the one just off the highway, partly because it’s cleaner, but mostly because there’s less of a risk of seeing someone you know. You’d hate to have a student catching you buying a strap-on. Oh, the rumors.

The salesperson is a heavily tattooed girl with electric blue hair and a black heart stamped on each freckled cheekbone. She’s really helpful, though. She takes her time explaining just how all the buckles work, and which dildo to buy to fit into which harness, so do your best not to judge her too harshly. She also recommends buying silicone-based lube over water-based lube, because apparently it lasts longer and isn’t harmful in anal sex the way it is in vaginal sex.

So you give her a five-dollar tip for her troubles, to which she responds by giving you the toothiest smile you’ve seen in your entire life and telling you your boyfriend has no idea how lucky he is.

Which you give her another three dollars for because she’s completely right.

(About Keishin not knowing how lucky he is to have you. Not about him being your boyfriend, because he’s fucking not, okay?)

You bring your goodies home, feeling like you always feel after shopping: like you’ve just gotten a load of Christmas presents, and they’re waiting to be unwrapped. You have the presence of mind to hide the black and red bag in your oversized purse before entering your building. Just in case you happen to share the elevator with one of the old ladies on your floor.

Once you get into your apartment, you lock your door and layout your purchases on your dining room table, immediately picking up the dildo to test its weight. You’d picked a sparkly ribbed one, not because you particularly like it, but because you can’t wait to see Keishin’s face when he saw it. You’re pretty sure it’ll end up somewhere between shock, reproach, and begrudging amusement.

It’s the same abrasive yellow as Keishin’s bleached hair, average-sized, chosen more for entertainment value than anything else. You slot it into place then give the shaft an experimental tug to see just how well the metal ring in the harness holds it in place. Satisfied with the result, you examine the nubby, double-pronged vibrator on the opposite end of the harness. It’s supposed to go inside you when everything’s in place, so you get something out of it while you fuck Keishin senseless.

Though you’re reasonably sure that the very act itself of fucking Keishin senseless would have you curling your toes, you’re not about to deny yourself some extra stimulation.

You test the silicone lube between your fingertips. It feels weird, like the silicone-based face primer you’d used in high school, though this was less powdery and more expensive. You test on the skin above your knee, curious to see how long it takes to dry off.

While you wait, you take all of your clothes off, hanging up your blazer and throwing the rest in the hamper. You examine the harness, it’s an intimidating contraption of black nylon and silvery buckles, but that doesn’t deter you. You’re a high school science teacher, thank you very much. You explain physics to teenagers all day. This is nothing compared to that.

And actually, when you fit it onto your hips, it’s not too bad. A strap goes around each thigh, like a bikini, and one loops around your waist. You tighten the straps and peer down at the yellow, glittery penis now hanging heavily at the apex of your thighs. Huh. So this is what penises are like?

You grip the base and stroke up, grimacing at the sensation of your hand skidding over the rubber. Oh. Lube. Right. You squeeze some lube onto the dildo and start stroking again, much smoother this time. You hate how good the angle is; no wonder guys get so picky about handjobs. You fist it for a few minutes, feeling the vibrator bump against your clit. Which, considering its not even on, has no right to feel that good.

Once you get used to the way the dildo moves within its ring and how to compensate for the way the straps shift on your hips, you take the strap-on off and clean the dildo of lube. The stuff is way better than water-based lube, and you can’t wait to see it in action. You pack the strap-on and the lube back into the bag and leave it in your bedroom. Then you take a seat at your dining room table, pulling out a stack of ungraded papers instead. Time to spend some quality time with Marie Curie.

The next two days are validating, if nothing else. Keishin’s decided to go full little shit and keeps sexting you in the middle of your lectures like you’re supposed to just be able to explain oxygen theory of combustion after receiving a text detailing just how hard his cock is. You’d given him your best glare and sent a lengthy email telling him to fuck off, but to no avail. Plus, yesterday, he showed up at your office hours after practice, covered in sweat, and looking ridiculously hot, “just to say hi.” You won’t let it bother you, though. He’ll get what he deserves soon enough.

By Friday afternoon, you’re a mass of nerves and vindictive anticipation. Keishin’s been shooting you heated smirks all day. At lunch, he purposefully spills a packet soy sauce all over his hand just to seductively lick it off each of his fingers. You think it really speaks to your libido that, under the righteous indignation, you were actually pretty turned on by that. Stupid fucking Keishin, getting you hot and bothered with convenience store dumplings, of all things.

You’re practically vibrating when you open the door to your apartment at seven sharp, tamping down on your anxiety. You give Keishin your most relaxed, most expectant smile, and he responds by giving you that stupid(ly sexy) smirk and thrusting a bottle of cheap wine your way.

“Hey, Princess,” he says, bending down to peck you on the cheek. “How was your week?”

“Um,” you blink at him owlishly, thrown, “fine?”

“Really?” Keishin asks, stepping into your apartment and closing the door behind himself. As soon as the lock clicks into place, he’s on you like a starfish, head tucked into your neck. “Because mine’s been torture. All I can think about is how gorgeous you look under me. Over me. Everywhere. God, you drive me nuts.”

You feel something heavy in your chest. You bring your hands up to card through his hair. “I know the feeling.” Because all jokes and exasperation aside, Keishin’s under your skin in a big way, pumping you full of something that tastes like burnt, thick sugar and smells like Valentine’s Day chocolates. You’re drowning in Keishin Ukai, and you fucking love it.

“Do you now?” Keishin stills, then his hands change directions on your back, one scooping down to you ass and the other up into your hair. “And how does it feel, Princess?”

Oh, and there’s the smarmy little imp that’s been harassing you in school. Your lips curl into a devilish smile, out of Keishin’s line of sight, and you lean your weight into his hold. “Oh, I’m not sure I can even explain it, Keishin,” you sigh woefully. “Maybe I should just show you instead.”

“I think I could get behind that,” he agrees, pulling back. “Maybe even literally.” He leers down at you, eyes dancing with mirth.

“Classy, Ukai.” You snort despite yourself. “Remind me why I ever agreed to have sex with you?”

“Is that a request or an invitation?” His hands fall to your hips, thumbs rubbing lazy circles into your hipbones, “I accept both.”

You purse your lips, whether to fight a grin or a scowl, you’re unsure. “Let’s take this to the bedroom,” you suggest. “I have a surprise for you.”

“A surprise?” Keishin grins. “Lead the way.”

You set the wine bottle on the table and lead him by the hand to your room, hips swaying, nerves were forgotten. This is going to be so much fun. You open the door to your room, watching Keishin leap onto the bed. “Close your eyes and take off your clothes,” you order, unbuttoning your blouse. Keishin inhales sharply, eyes falling shut as he peels off his shirts and wiggles free from his pants. He’s already half-hard, boxers just beginning to tent.

“Can I open my eyes yet?”

“Not yet, no,” you replied, opening the drawer and pulling out your bag of tricks. you slid the strap-on into place, tightening the buckles with confident, practiced accuracy. “I thought we’d try something different today. Just the thought of it has kept me wet all week.”

Keishin twitches in his boxers, fists clenching on the edge of the bed. “Now, I’ve got to know. ”

“Open your eyes.”

Keishin blinks them open, freezing when they land on the dildo. You stroke it slowly, delighting in the way a ruddy blush works up his toned chest.

“Oh,” he says, sounding faintly disappointed. “I thought….”

“You thought you could tease me all week at school and get away with it,” you supply, baring your teeth when he flinches. “Newsflash asshole, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So, what do you think of my cock, Keishin? I picked it out special, just for you.”

Keishin shudders, bowing his head in supplication. “Tell me what to do,” he says, voice gone hoarse.

“Answer the question.”

“It’s, uh,” Keishin stammers, glancing up at it, “it’s very… pretty?”

“Damn straight, it is,” you growl, striding toward the bed in long, slow steps. “What are you going to do with such a pretty cock, Keishin?” And wow, where is this coming from? You’re just supposed to fuck him and get it over with. This aggression is all-new, but you’d be lying if you said it didn’t feel good. And, judging by how hard Keishin is, you assume the feeling is mutual.

“Can I suck it?” he asks meekly, eyes pointedly not meeting yours. A total display of submission. You approve. You move to stand in front of him, positioning the cock at his lips, quirking an eyebrow at him.

Keishin groans, reaching out to suck the head into his mouth. He bobs his head, working deeper down your shaft each time. You bite your lip, feeling a hot wave of arousal work down your spine. He’s beautiful like this, cheeks hollowed around the length of yellow, sparkly rubber. Your hand leaves the base to cup the back of his head, and his hand takes its place. He pulls back to suckle at the head, eyes looking up at you heatedly.

Fuck.

“So pretty,” you sigh, hand petting the dark hair on the nape of his neck. “I can see why guys like this so much.” Keishin’s eyes flutter shut, lashes long against his cheekbones. “What do you think, Keishin? Do you like sucking cock?”

Keishin moans, sucking as deep as he can go. When his eyes meet yours again, they’re desperate. His free hand moves to his own cock, pulling it out of the gape of his underwear.

You freeze, pulling his head back by the grip in his hair. “Did I say you could touch yourself?” Keishin shoots you a pleading look, but you’re already pulling out of his mouth, dildo shiny with spit. “Take them off, get on the bed. Hands and knees.”

He stumbles to do your bidding, cock dark red and angry-looking. You pick up the lube from where you’d placed it on the nightstand and kneel behind him. The lube opens with a wet click that makes Keishin jerk in surprise. You spread the lube liberally on your fingers, reaching out to trace one over his hole, teasing. Keishin mewls and pushes back, eagerly. You feel another gush of heat between your legs, pushing the finger in slowly. You work the finger in and out, curling it down to find his prostate. You find it on the fourth try, judging by the way he keens and clenches around you.

The second finger is met with a little resistance, and Keishin takes in a deep breath to relax his muscles. You kiss the small of his back in praise, scissoring the fingers once you’re able. This is a lot more intimate than you’d expected it to be, working Keishin open like this. It fills you with a strange sense of responsibility, you want to do this right, you want to make it good for him.

“Just relax, Keishin,” you whisper, as he whines and clenches around your third finger, “you can do this. We can stop anytime you want.”

Keishin heaves a great, shivering breath, but he relaxes. You work as slowly as you can, pushing against his rim more than thrusting in until he’s loose enough to take you. You squirt more lube onto your fingers, pushing them slowly into him until he takes them all the way to the knuckle. You make sure to graze his prostate every few thrusts, only content when he’s moving back to meet you thrust-for-thrust.

“M'ready,” he whispers, sounding wrecked. You pressed a kiss his hipbone in sympathy. “Want you.”

“Okay,” you say softly, pulling your lube-slick fingers out of him. You lube up your cock quickly, pressing the tip to his rim. “You sure?”

“Do it, Princess,” he says, wriggling his hips, “or I’ll start bringing bananas for lunch.”

You huff out a laugh, rolling your eyes. “Idiot.” You hold the cock firmly in one hand, pressing it carefully into him. His breath hitches and stops, and he leans into the intrusion. You press a wet kiss to the back of his neck when the head slides in. “How’s that?” You ask, moving slowly until the base of the dildo is pressed against his ass.

“Gimme a minute,” he manages, shoulders locked with tension. You hold your position, rubbing soothingly over his back and down his flanks. After a minute, he moves, shoulders relaxing. “Go slow, okay?”

You murmur an “okay” and pull out an inch. You move back in, starting a rhythm of tiny thrusts. You only lengthen them when he grows impatient and flails a hand at you. You pull out almost all the way, then shove back in, gasping when the vibrator buzzes to life over your clit.

You begin moving in earnest, grinding into him to feel the vibrator flutter against your clit. God, it felt good. You shift to the right a little, and Keishin moans, all high and whimpery and divine. You move to hit that spot again, grinning when he chokes out another moan. You angle yourself so that all of your thrusts will meet that spot, draping yourself over his back to work a hand on his cock. He’s hard as a rock and dripping pre-cum as he twitches under your touch.

Keishin makes a broken sound and works his hips, thrusting back onto your fake cock and forward into your fist. You feel the world spin around you; this was by far the hottest thing you ever done with anyone.

And you think Keishin might agree because thirty seconds later he starts babbling:“ fuck, I’m gonna cum. Shit, feel so perfect inside me, please, let me cum, tell me I can cum, please. I need you to say yes, please.”

You suck in a breath through your teeth. He wants you to give him permission? Oh, fuck, yes. “Cum for me, Keishin, wanna see you cum around my cock,” you command, voice deeper than you’d ever heard it. Keishin whimpers, and he’s cumming, hips spasming. You watch his hole clench around your cock and feel yet another gush of heat, this one dripping down your thighs. You continue to move inside him until he gasps and pulls away. You pull out slowly, groaning at the way his skin tugs around the length of you.

He flips onto his back as soon as he’s free, fingers racing to undo the buckles of your harness. “You didn’t come.” He huffs, tugging at the straps, “I wanna make you come. Please let me.”

You shove the strap-on away, throwing it half-way across the room. “How do you want me, Keishin?”

Keishin collapses, rubbery, on the bed. “Sit on my face, Princess.”

Fuck. You can do that. You move up until your knees bracket his head and hold yourself over his face. “Fuck, you’re so wet,” he whispers, kissing the dampness from your thighs, working up to your center.

He licks into you delicately, mopping up all of your juices. You’re hypersensitive already and gasp into his teasing touches. Keishin slides his tongue inside you, curling it upwards. You keen, grinding down onto his mouth before you can stop yourself. You move to pull off to apologize, but Keishin holds your hips down, face more blissful than you’ve ever seen it. You run your fingers through his hair, swiveling your hips over his mouth.

“Need you on my clit,” you gasp and Keishin hums (which, okay, wow) and sucks your clit between his lips, sliding two thick fingers into you. He licks and sucks at you, pushing you farther and farther closer to the edge, but it’s the gentle nibble that finally pushes you over it. You scream soundlessly, fingers scrambling for purchase on the bed. His hands keep you from falling off his mouth as he licks you down from your orgasm. When you mewl in discomfort, he presses one last kiss to you clit before pulling away.

You collapse next to him, thighs sore and blissed out.

“Learn your lesson?” you asked him sleepily, eyes closing.

“No wonder none of the boys are failing physics. You’re quite the teacher,” Keishin nods, still panting slightly. “Though, I think you may have to go over it again sometime.”

You laugh and turn to look at him. He’s smiling back at you, eyes soft and happy. The heavy feeling in your chest returns, and you feel like you can’t breathe. You lean in and kiss him, ignoring the way he tastes like you. His own flavor was much sweeter. “I think we can manage that,” you whisper against his glistening lips.

He lazily tangles his hand in yours and brings it up to kiss you knuckles. “Good.”

When you wake the next morning with muscular forearms wrapped around you, you panic for a moment before remembering who it is and relax into Keishin’s embrace.

#keishin ukai x reader #keishin ukai imagines #keishin ukai scenarios

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falling-pages · 4 years

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Happy Birthday: Mori x Haruhi

Okay guys so this isn’t the fourth part BUT i came up with this since it is the big guy’s birthday today, so I hope y’all enjoy it! It’s not exactly smut but it’s not just fluff either...it gets kinda steamy for the birthday boy.

Mori never was one for birthday parties. Not his, at least--he enjoyed celebrating his friends, but the thought of all the attention on him sent squeamish rolls through his stomach.

He was still sifting through escape plans when their taxi stopped outside the lounge where the club was to celebrate. Soft rain pattered against the window, sending his instincts into overdrive. Rainy nights were best spent in his house drinking tea and reading a book to Haruhi tucked under his arm. Not binge-drinking or dancing among strangers. Certainly not strippers, after the disaster at the twins’ party, and especially now that he was spoken for. But the club had had swanky ideas over the years, so he should have seen this coming.

Haruhi squeezed his hand before popping out of the vehicle. Even she was excited for tonight, and her idea of fun was doing extra credit for her law classes. As Mori gave the driver some cash, grumbling out a thanks, he suspected his girlfriend had something up her sleeve. There had to be a reason she was so excited to go to a downtown lounge.

Mori groaned as he stretched out of the taxi--right into a puddle of water. Dampness flooded his socks. It only strengthened his resolve to go home. He was normally a very patient man, but not when he was in a bad mood.

Haruhi chuckled at this, her eyes reflecting the neon lights of the buildings around them. Even in the darkest times she was still so bright. Mori needed her light gazes as he walked through life--staying silent inside his mind could be very dark sometimes.

He shot her a look, which only encouraged her laughter. “Let’s get inside before the rest of you gets wet,” she teased, tugging his hand. With a sigh, Mori raised his jacket to cover her the few remaining steps to the lounge.

Glass doors showed a pitch-dark room bustling with people dodging security guards and each other. Pink and green florescence dazzled into different shapes on the wall, sending spikes through his eyes. Soon the bass of some song melted into a throbbing sensation inside his brain.

Haruhi noticed his scowl, deeper than usual, and turned his cheek with her palm. He sank into her touch, closing his eyes and pressing a gentle kiss to her fingers. Even with her high heels on she barely cleared his pecs. Still, it was enough to have her there anchoring him.

“I know this isn’t really your scene,” she said, “but this is your last birthday in college. The boys wanted it to be special.”

Mori nodded, semi-content with her answer. There was a lot he had put up with for the club even back in high school. As long as it was for them, he could do it. As long as the attention was mostly off him.

God help anyone who made him do karaoke.

“No one will make you do karaoke,” Haruhi said.

Mori grinned at her almost telepathic powers. She stomped straight up to the bouncer and tore his attention from the massive line at the entrance. “We’re here with Kyoya Ootori,” she stated matter-of-factly. College had emboldened her. No longer the shy student stuttering over a broken vase.

The bouncer opened the door for them, ushering them into the foyer. Though the music was louder here, they were sheltered from the rain, and Mori had an excuse to pull his girlfriend close.

She had the same thought. Grabbing him by the lapels, Haruhi gave him a quick kiss before dropping her gaze to his neck. “You know,” she began, “be a good boy tonight, and you’ll get your present as soon as we get home.”

Both of their faces flushed, seemingly drawing heat from each other. Mori let his hands wander to the small of her back, totally entrenched in her sudden public seductiveness. Haruhi shifted under his touch and he felt something under her dress. It felt like a bodysuit, lingerie she had never worn before.

At her encouragement, his fingers trailed the outline of the corset, finding the rough lace through the nylon of her dress. Tracing it down, down...he found it stretched over her butt and gave it a tight squeeze.

Haruhi pulled his mouth to her neck, allowing him to press kisses on her skin. He always craved her, but especially in situations where he couldn’t have her. Just the feeling of this new lingerie set, mixed with the heavy scent of her perfume and the pre-game shot he had before coming, made him want to open his gift now.

When his hands slid up her skirt, eyes finding the bathroom nearby, Haruhi stopped him with a click of her tongue.

“Uh-huh. It’s not technically your birthday for another half-hour,” she said. “You’re going to have to wait until then.”

“Only if you stop being a tease,” Mori replied gruffly, quickly nipping her earlobe. Disappointment washed over him, but he had trained himself not ot give in to his desires so easily.

“Oh, Takashi.” Haruhi pulled away and gave her best coy smile. “I have the power now.”

Mori considered this, resisting the urge to back her up against the wall and teach her a lesson right there. Though he preferred to be dominant and in charge, there was just something murky lodged in her eyes, a wicked whim, and something in the way she said “good boy” earlier that absolutely fried his brain with desire. Giving her the reins for one night could be fun.

He’d make her pay for her behavior later.

“I’ll play your game,” he whispered, holding that deadly eye contact. “But I intend to win.”

“I intend to let you,” she said. She took his hand and led him out of the foyer and into the lounge itself to their waiting friends. “Now. Let’s enjoy your party.”

#ouran high school host club #ohshc #haruhi fujioka #takashi morinozuka #mori x haruhi #takashi x haruhi #takashi fanfic #takashi imagine #mori fanfic #mori imagine #host imagine #moriharu #takaharu

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blackkudos · 4 years

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Louis Farrakhan

Louis Farrakhan Sr. (; born Louis Eugene Walcott; May 11, 1933), formerly known as Louis X, is an American minister and political activist. He is the leader of the Nation of Islam (NOI), an organization which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes as black nationalist, black supremacist and a hate group. Previously, he served as the minister of mosques in Boston and Harlem and had been appointed National Representative of the Nation of Islam by former NOI leader Elijah Muhammad.

After Warith Deen Muhammad reorganized the original NOI into the orthodox Sunni Islamic group American Society of Muslims, Farrakhan began to rebuild the NOI as "Final Call". In 1981, he officially adopted the name "Nation of Islam", reviving the group and establishing its headquarters at Mosque Maryam.

Farrakhan has been described as antisemitic by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the SPLC and other monitoring organizations. The NOI promotes an anti-white theology, also according to the SPLC. Some of his remarks have also been considered homophobic. Farrakhan has disputed these characterizations.

In October 1995, he organized and led the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. Due to health issues, he reduced his responsibilities with the NOI in 2007. However, Farrakhan has continued to deliver sermons and speak at NOI events. In 2015, he led the 20th Anniversary of the Million Man March: Justice or Else.

Early life and education

Farrakhan was born Louis Eugene Walcott in The Bronx, New York, the younger of two sons of Sarah Mae Manning (January 16, 1900 – November 18, 1988) and Percival Clark, immigrants from the Anglo-Caribbean islands. His mother was born in Saint Kitts, while his father was Jamaican. The couple separated before their second son was born, and Farrakhan says he never knew his biological father. In a 1996 interview with Henry Louis Gates Jr., he speculated that his father, "Gene", may have been Jewish. After the end of his parents' relationship, his mother moved in with Louis Walcott from Barbados, who became his stepfather. After his stepfather died in 1936, the Walcott family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where they settled in the West Indian neighborhood of Roxbury.

Walcott received his first violin at the age of five and by the time he was 12 years old, he had been on tour with the Boston College Orchestra. A year later, he participated in national competitions and won them. In 1946, he was one of the first black performers to appear on the Ted Mack Original Amateur Hour, where he also won an award. Walcott and his family were active members of the Episcopal St. Cyprian's Church in Roxbury.

Walcott attended the Boston Latin School, and later the English High School, from which he graduated. He completed three years at Winston-Salem Teachers College, where he had a track scholarship.

In 1953, Walcott married Betsy Ross (later known as Khadijah Farrakhan) while he was in college. Due to complications from his new wife's first pregnancy, Walcott dropped out after completing his junior year of college to devote time to his wife and their child. Farrakhan has nine children in total.

Career and activities (1953–1995)

In the 1950s, Walcott began his professional music career as a singer billed as "The Charmer". At this point, earning $500 a week, Walcott was touring the northeastern and midwestern United States, sometimes also using the nickname "Calypso Gene".. In 1953–1954, preceding Harry Belafonte's success with his album Calypso (released in 1956), he recorded and released a dozen cheeky, funny tunes as "The Charmer" in a mixed mento/calypso style, including "Ugly Woman", "Stone Cold Me" and calypso standards like "Zombie Jamboree", "Hol 'Em Joe", "Mary Ann" and "Brown Skin Girl". Some were reissued: "Don’t Touch Me Nylon" has mild, explicit sexual lyrics as well as "Female Boxer", which contains some sexist overtones and "Is She Is, Or Is She Ain't" (inspired by Christine Jorgensen's sex change operation).

In February 1955, he was headlining a show in Chicago, Illinois, called Calypso Follies. There he first came in contact with the teachings of the Nation of Islam (NOI) through Rodney Smith, a friend and saxophonist from Boston. Walcott and his wife Betsy were invited to the Nation of Islam's annual Saviours' Day address by Elijah Muhammad. Prior to going to Saviours' Day, due to then-Minister Malcolm X's media presence, Walcott had never heard of Elijah Muhammad, and like many outside of the Nation of Islam, he thought that Malcolm X was the leader of the Nation of Islam.

In 1955, Walcott fulfilled the requirements to be a registered Muslim/registered believer/registered laborer. He memorized and recited verbatim the 10 questions and answers of the NOI's Student Enrollment. He then wrote a Saviour's Letter that must be sent to the NOI's headquarters in Chicago. The Saviour's Letter must be copied verbatim, and have the identical handwriting of the Nation of Islam's founder, Wallace Fard Muhammad. After having the Saviour's Letter reviewed, and approved by the NOI's headquarters in Chicago in July 1955, Walcott received a letter of approval from the Nation of Islam acknowledging his official membership as a registered Muslim/registered believer/registered laborer in the NOI. As a result, he received his "X." The "X" was considered a placeholder, used to indicate that Nation of Islam members' original African family names had been lost. They acknowledged that European surnames were slave names, assigned by the slaveowners to mark their ownership. Members of the NOI used the "X" while waiting for their Islamic names, which some NOI members received later in their conversion. Hence, Louis Walcott became Louis X. Elijah Muhammad then replaced his "X" with the "holy name" Farrakhan, an Arabic name meaning "The Criterion". On a very different tone from his calypso songs, he nevertheless recorded two tunes as Louis X, criticizing racism in A White Man's Heaven Is a Black Man's Hell issued on Boston's A Moslem Sings label in 1960..

The summer after Farrakhan's conversion, Elijah Muhammad stated that all musicians in the NOI had to choose between music and the Nation of Islam. Louis X did so only after performing one final event at the Nevele, a Jewish resort in the Catskills.

After nine months of being a registered Muslim in the NOI and a member of Muhammad's Temple of Islam in Boston, where Malcolm X was the minister, the former calypso-singer turned Muslim became his assistant minister. Eventually he became the official minister after Elijah Muhammad transferred Malcolm X to Muhammad's Temple of Islam No. 7 on West 116th St. in Harlem, New York City. Louis X continued to be mentored by Malcolm X, until the latter's assassination in 1965. The day that Malcolm X died in Harlem, Farrakhan happened to be in Newark, New Jersey on rotation, 45 minutes away from where Malcolm X was assassinated. After Malcolm X's death, Elijah Muhammad appointed Farrakhan to the two prominent positions that Malcolm held before being dismissed from the NOI. Farrakhan became the national spokesman/national representative of the NOI and was appointed minister of the influential Harlem Mosque (Temple), where he served until 1975.

Farrakhan made numerous incendiary statements about Malcolm X, contributing to what was called a "climate of vilification." Three men from a Newark, NOI mosque—Thomas Hagan, Muhammad Abdul Aziz (aka Norman 3X Butler) and Kahlil Islam (aka Thomas 15X Johnson)—were convicted of the killing and served prison sentences. Only Hagan ever admitted his role.

Leadership of Nation of Islam

Warith Deen Mohammed, the seventh son of Elijah and Clara Muhammad, was declared the new leader of the Nation of Islam at the annual Saviours' Day Convention in February 1975, a day after his father died. He made substantial changes to the organization in the late 1970s, taking most members into a closer relationship with orthodox Islam, and renaming the group "World Community of Islam in the West", and eventually the American Society of Muslims, to indicate the apparent change. He rejected the deification of the founder Wallace D. Fard as Allah in person, the Mahdi of the Holy Qur'an and the messiah of the Bible, welcomed white worshipers who were once considered devils and enemies in the NOI as equal brothers, sisters, and friends. At the beginning of these changes, Chief Min. Warith Deen Mohammed gave some Euro-Americans X's, and extended efforts at inter-religious cooperation and outreach to Christians and Jews. He changed his position and title from Chief Minister Wallace Muhammad to Imam Warith Huddin Mohammad, and finally Imam Warith Al-Deen Mohammed.

Farrakhan joined and followed Imam Warith Al-Deen Mohammed, and eventually became a Sunni Imam under him for 3 1⁄2 years from 1975–1978. Imam Mohammed gave Imam Farrakhan the name Abdul-Haleem. In 1978, Imam Farrakhan distanced himself from Mohammed's movement. In a 1990 interview with Emerge magazine, Farrakhan said that he had become disillusioned and decided to "quietly walk away" rather than cause a schism among the members. In 1978, Farrakhan and a small number of supporters decided to rebuild what they considered the original Nation of Islam upon the foundations established by Wallace Fard Muhammad, and Elijah Muhammad. This decision was made without public announcement.

In 1979, Farrakhan's group founded a weekly newspaper entitled The Final Call, which was intended to be similar to the original Muhammad Speaks newspaper that Malcolm X claimed to have started, Farrakhan had a weekly column in The Final Call. In 1981, Farrakhan and his supporters held their first Saviours' Day convention in Chicago, Illinois, and took back the name of the Nation of Islam. The event was similar to the earlier Nation's celebrations, last held in Chicago on February 26, 1975. At the convention's keynote address, Farrakhan announced his attempt to restore the Nation of Islam under Elijah Muhammad's teachings.

In 1985, Farrakhan obtained working capital in the amount of $5 million, in the form of an interest-free loan from Libya's Islamic Call Society. Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi had also offered Farrahkan guns to begin a black nation. Farrakhan said that he told Gaddafi that he preferred an economic investment in black America.

On October 24, 1989, at a press conference at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Washington, DC, Minister Farrakhan described a vision which he had on September 17, 1985 in Tepoztlán, Mexico. In this 'Vision-like' experience he was carried up to "a Wheel, or what you call an unidentified flying object", as in the Bible's Book of Ezekiel. During this experience, he heard the voice of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam. He said in the press conference that Elijah Muhammad "spoke in short cryptic sentences and as he spoke a scroll full of cursive writing rolled down in front of my eyes, but it was a projection of what was being written in my mind. As I attempted to read the cursive writing, which was in English, the scroll disappeared and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad began to speak to me." [Elijah Muhammad said], "President Reagan has met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to plan a war. I want you to hold a press conference in Washington, D.C., and announce their plan and say to the world that you got the information from me, Elijah Muhammad, on the Wheel."

During that same press conference Farrakhan stated that he believed his "experience" was proven: "In 1987, in The New York Times' Sunday magazine and on the front page of The Atlanta Constitution, the truth of my vision was verified, for the headlines of The Atlanta Constitution read, 'President Reagan Planned War Against Libya.'" Farrakhan added "In the article which followed, the exact words that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad spoke to me on the Wheel were found; that the President had met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and planned a war against Libya in the early part of September 1985."

Qubilah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz, was arrested on January 12, 1995 accused of conspiracy to assassinate Farrakhan in retaliation for the murder of her father, for which she believed he was responsible. According to Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson, "[her family] resented Farrakhan and had good reason to because he was one of those in the Nation responsible for the climate of vilification that resulted in Malcolm X's assassination". Some critics later alleged that the FBI had used paid informant Michael Fitzpatrick to frame Shabazz, who was four years old when her father was killed. Nearly four months later, on May 1, Shabazz accepted a plea agreement under which she maintained her innocence but accepted responsibility for her actions.

Million Man March

That year in October, Farrakhan convened a broad coalition of what he and his supporters claimed was one million men in Washington, D.C., for the Million Man March. The count however fell far below the hoped-for numbers. The National Park Service estimated that approximately 440,000 were in attendance. Farrakhan threatened to sue the National Park Service because of the low estimate from the Park Police.

Farrakhan and other speakers called for black men to renew their commitments to their families and communities. In Farrakhan's 21⁄2 hours he quoted from spirituals as well as the Old and New Testaments and termed himself a prophet sent by God to show America its evil. The event was organized by many civil rights and religious organizations and drew men and their sons from across the United States of America. Many other distinguished African Americans addressed the throng, including: Maya Angelou; Rosa Parks; Martin Luther King III, Cornel West, Jesse Jackson and Benjamin Chavis. In 2005, together with other prominent African Americans such as the New Black Panther Party leader Malik Zulu Shabazz, the activist Al Sharpton, Addis Daniel and others, Farrakhan marked the 10th anniversary of the Million Man March by holding a second gathering, the Millions More Movement, October 14–17 in Washington D.C.

Activities and statements since 2005

Hurricane Katrina

In comments in 2005, Farrakhan stated that there was a 25-foot (7.6 m) hole under one of the key levees that failed in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. He implied that the levee's destruction was a deliberate attempt to wipe out the population of the largely black sections within the city. Farrakhan later said that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told him of the crater during a meeting in Dallas, Texas. Farrakhan further claimed that the fact the levee broke the day after Hurricane Katrina is proof that the destruction of the levee was not a natural occurrence. Farrakhan has raised additional questions and has called for federal investigations into the source of the levee break. He also asserted that the hurricane was "God's way of punishing America for its warmongering and racism".

Experts including the Independent Levee Investigation Team (ILIT) from the University of California, Berkeley have countered his accusations. The report from the ILIT said "The findings of this panel are that the over-topping of the levees by flood waters, the often sub-standard materials used to shore up the levees, and the age of the levees contributed to these scour holes found at many of the sites of levee breaks after the hurricane."

Former support for Barack Obama

In 2008, Farrakhan publicly criticized the United States and supported then-Senator Barack Obama who was campaigning at the time to become the president of the United States of America. Farrakhan and Obama had met at least once before.

The Obama campaign quickly responded to convey his distance from the minister. "Senator Obama has been clear in his objections to Farrakhan's past pronouncements and has not solicited the minister's support," said Obama spokesman Bill Burton. Obama "rejected and denounced" Farrakhan's support during an NBC presidential candidate debate.

Following the 2008 presidential election, Farrakhan explained, during a BET television interview, that he was "careful" never to endorse Obama during his campaign. "I talked about him—but, in very beautiful and glowing terms, stopping short of endorsing him. And unfortunately, or fortunately, however we look at it, the media said I 'endorsed' him, so he renounced my so-called endorsement and support. But that didn't stop me from supporting him."

By 2011, Farrakhan was no longer supporting Obama, whom he called the "first Jewish president", due to Obama's support for the 2011 military intervention in Libya, which Farrakhan strongly opposed due to his own support for Muammar Gaddafi. At a March 31, 2011 press conference held at the Mosque Maryam, Farrakhan warned that the United States could be "facing a major earthquake as part of God's divine judgment against the country for her evil".

On May 28, 2011, Farrakhan, speaking at the American Clergy Leadership Conference, lambasted Obama over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Libya intervention, calling him an "assassin" and a "murderer." "We voted for our brother Barack, a beautiful human being with a sweet heart," Farrakhan said, in a video making the rounds on the internet. But he has turned into someone else, Farrakhan told the crowd. "Now he's an assassin."

Farrakhan, a critic of military interventionism overseas, was strongly opposed to Obama's proposal to intervene in Syria in 2013.

Dianetics

On May 8, 2010, Farrakhan publicly announced his embrace of Dianetics and has actively encouraged Nation of Islam members to undergo auditing from the Church of Scientology. Although he has stressed that he is not a Scientologist, but only a believer in Dianetics and the theories related to it, the Church honored Farrakhan previously during its 2006 Ebony Awakening awards ceremony (which he did not attend). Farrakhan has also urged European Americans to join the Church of Scientology, stating, "All white people should flock to [Scientology founder] L. Ron Hubbard. You can still be a Christian; you just won't be a devil Christian. You can still be a Jew, but you won't be a satanic Jew."

Since the announcement in 2010, the Nation of Islam has been hosting its own Dianetic courses and its own graduation ceremonies. At the third such ceremony, which was held on Saviours Day 2013, it was announced that nearly 8,500 members of the organisation had undergone Dianetic auditing. The Organisation announced it had graduated 1,055 auditors and had delivered 82,424 hours of auditing. The graduation ceremony was certified by the Church of Scientology, and the Nation of Islam members received official certification. The ceremony was attended by Shane Woodruff, vice-president of the Church of Scientology's Celebrity Centre International. He stated that "The unfolding story of the Nation of Islam and Dianetics is bold, it is determined and it is absolutely committed to restoring freedom and wiping hell from the face of this planet."

Praise for Donald Trump

During the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries, Farrakhan praised Republican candidate Donald Trump as the only candidate "who has stood in front of the Jewish community and said 'I don’t want your money.'" While he declined to endorse outright, he said of Trump "I like what I'm looking at." In 2018, Farrakhan again praised Trump for "destroying every enemy that was an enemy of our rise." Conservative pundits Candace Owens and Glenn Beck both took note of Farrakhan's position, with Owens saying it was a "really big deal" that Farrakhan had "aligned himself with Trump's administration" and Beck declaring that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and urging "reconciliation" between conservatives and Farrakhan.

Criticism and controversy

Farrakhan has been the center of much controversy with critics saying that his political views and comments are antisemitic or racist. Farrakhan has categorically denied these charges and stated that much of America's perception of him has been shaped by the media.

Malcolm X's death

Many, including Malcolm X's family, have accused Farrakhan of being involved in the plot to assassinate Malcolm X. For many years, Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, harbored resentment toward the Nation of Islam—and Farrakhan in particular—for what she felt was their role in the assassination of her husband. In a 1993 speech, Farrakhan seemed to confirm that the Nation of Islam was responsible for the assassination:

We don't give a damn about no white man law if you attack what we love. And frankly, it ain't none of your business. What do you got to say about it? Did you teach Malcolm? Did you make Malcolm? Did you clean up Malcolm? Did you put Malcolm out before the world? Was Malcolm your traitor or ours? And if we dealt with him like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours? You just shut your mouth, and stay out of it. Because in the future, we gonna become a nation. And a nation gotta be able to deal with traitors and cutthroats and turncoats. The white man deals with his. The Jews deal with theirs.

During a 1994 interview, Gabe Pressman asked Shabazz whether Farrakhan "had anything to do" with Malcolm X's death. She replied: "Of course, yes. Nobody kept it a secret. It was a badge of honor. Everybody talked about it, yes."

In a 60 Minutes interview that aired during May 2000, Farrakhan stated that some of the things he said may have led to the assassination of Malcolm X. "I may have been complicit in words that I spoke", he said. "I acknowledge that and regret that any word that I have said caused the loss of life of a human being." A few days later Farrakhan denied that he "ordered the assassination" of Malcolm X, although he again acknowledged that he "created the atmosphere that ultimately led to Malcolm X's assassination."

Allegations of racism

The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies Farrakhan's Nation of Islam (NOI) as a hate group and black separatist organization. As the leader of NOI, Farrakhan has preached the organization's theology that blacks are superior to whites. He has said whites were created 6,600 years ago as a "race of devils" by an evil scientist named Yakub. At an event in Milwaukee in August 2015, Farrakhan said: "White people deserve to die, and they know, so they think it’s us coming to do it."

Antisemitic comments

Farrakhan has made many comments that have been deemed antisemitic by the Anti-Defamation League and others. In 2012, the Simon Wiesenthal Center included some of Farrakhan's comments on its list of the Top 10 antisemitic slurs of that year.

"Gutter religion" remarks

In 1984, after returning from a visit to Libya, Farrakhan delivered a sermon that was recorded by a Chicago Sun Times reporter. A transcript from part of the sermon was published in The New York Times:

Toward the end of that portion of his speech that was recorded, Mr. Farrakhan said: "Now that nation called Israel never has had any peace in 40 years and she will never have any peace because there can be no peace structured on injustice, thievery, lying and deceit and using the name of God to shield your dirty religion under His holy and righteous name.

Farrakhan has repeatedly denied referring to Judaism as a "gutter religion" explaining that he was instead referring to what he believed was the Israeli Government's use of Judaism as a political tool. In a June 18, 1997, letter to a former Wall Street Journal editor Jude Wanniski he stated:

Countless times over the years I have explained that I never referred to Judaism as a gutter religion, but, clearly referred to the machinations of those who hide behind the shield of Judaism while using unjust political means to achieve their objectives. This was distilled in the New York tabloids and other media saying, 'Farrakhan calls Judaism a gutter religion.'

As a Muslim, I revere Abraham, Moses, and all the Prophets whom Allah (God) sent to the children of Israel. I believe in the scriptures brought by these Prophets and the Laws of Allah (God) as expressed in the Torah. I would never refer to the Revealed Word of Allah (God)—the basis of Jewish Faith—as 'dirty' or 'gutter.' You know, Jude, as well as I, that the Revealed Word of Allah (God) comes as a Message from Allah (God) to purify us from our evil that has divided us and caused us to fall into the gutter.

Over the centuries, the evils of Christians, Jews and Muslims have dirtied their respective religions. True Faith in the laws and Teaching of Abraham, Jesus and Muhammad is not dirty, but, practices in the name of these religions can be unclean and can cause people to look upon the misrepresented religion as being unclean.

Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust

In response to Farrakhan's speech, Nathan Pearlmutter, then Chair of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith, referred to Farrakhan as the new "Black Hitler" and Village Voice journalist Nat Hentoff also characterized the NOI leader as a "Black Hitler" while a guest on a New York radio talk-show.

In response, Farrakhan announced during a March 11, 1984, speech broadcast on a Chicago radio station:

So I said to the members of the press, 'Why won't you go and look into what we are saying about the threats on Reverend Jackson's life?' Here the Jews don't like Farrakhan and so they call me 'Hitler'. Well that's a good name. Hitler was a very great man. He wasn't great for me as a Black man but he was a great German and he rose Germany up from the ashes of her defeat by the united force of all of Europe and America after the First World War. Yet Hitler took Germany from the ashes and rose her up and made her the greatest fighting machine of the twentieth century, brothers and sisters, and even though Europe and America had deciphered the code that Hitler was using to speak to his chiefs of staff, they still had trouble defeating Hitler even after knowing his plans in advance. Now I'm not proud of Hitler's evil toward Jewish people, but that's a matter of record. He rose Germany up from nothing. Well, in a sense you could say there is a similarity in that we are rising our people up from nothing, but don't compare me with your wicked killers.

At a later meeting of the Nation of Islam at Madison Square Garden in 1985, Farrakhan said of the Jews: "And don't you forget, when it's God who puts you in the ovens, it's forever!" He has claimed German Jews financed the Holocaust in a speech at the Mosque Maryam, Chicago in March 1995. Almost three years later at a Saviors' Day gathering in the same city, he said: "The Jews have been so bad at politics they lost half their population in the Holocaust. They thought they could trust in Hitler, and they helped him get the Third Reich on the road."

Incidents and comments since 2002

On March 23, 2002, Farrakhan visited Kahal Kadosh Shaare Shalom in Kingston, Jamaica, which was his first visit to a synagogue, in an attempt to repair his relationship with the Jewish community.

Farrakhan was accepted to speak at Shaare Shalom in the native country of his father, after being rejected to appear at American synagogues, many of whom had fear of sending the wrong signals to the Jewish community.

Farrakhan made antisemitic comments during his May 16–17, 2013 visit to Detroit and in his weekly sermons titled "The Time and What Must Be Done", which began during January 2013. In March 2015, Farrakhan accused "Israelis and Zionist Jews" of being involved in the September 11 attacks. In his Saviours' Day speech in February 2018, Farrakhan described "the powerful Jews" as his enemy and approvingly cited President Richard Nixon and the Reverend Billy Graham's derogatory comments about Jews "grip on the media", and claimed they are responsible for "all of this filth and degenerate behavior that Hollywood is putting out turning men into women and women into men".

Allegations of sexism

Farrakhan received sexual discrimination complaints filed with a New York state agency when he banned women from attending a speech he gave in a city-owned theater in 1993. The next year he gave a speech only women could attend. In his speech for women, as The New York Times reported,

Mr. Farrakhan urged the women to embrace his formula for a successful family. He encouraged them to put husbands and children ahead of their careers, shun tight, short skirts, stay off welfare and reject abortion. He also stressed the importance of cooking and cleaning and urged women not to abandon homemaking for careers. 'You're just not going to be happy unless there is happiness in the home,' Mr. Farrakhan said at the Mason Cathedral Church of God in Christ in the Dorchester section, not far from the Roxbury neighborhood where he was raised by a single mother. 'Your professional lives can't satisfy your soul like a good, loving man.'

Social media

Farrakhan lost his blue tick on his Twitter posts in June 2018, denying him full verification, after asserting the Harvey Weinstein scandal was about "Jewish power". A contributor to the Tablet website, Yair Rosenberg, objected to a potential suspension as "erasing hate from social media doesn’t make it go away, it just makes it easier to ignore" making them more difficult to dismiss as "inconsequential". The following October, Twitter said that it would not suspend Farrakhan's account after he made his "anti-termite" comment as he had not broken the site's rules.

At the beginning of May 2019, Farrakhan was banned from Facebook, along with others considered to be extremist figures, with antisemitism believed to be the reason.

During a speech at Saint Sabina Catholic Church in Chicago a week later, Farrakhan stated he had "never been arrested" for "drunken driving" and asked: "What have I done that you would hate me like that?" The Nation of Islam said his speech was Farrakhan's response to the "public outrage over the unprecedented and unwarranted lifetime ban" from Facebook. He insisted he was neither a misogynist nor a homophobe and that: "I do not hate Jewish people". Archbishop of Chicago Cardinal Blase J. Cupich condemned the decision of the church in allowing Farrakhan to speak there.

Other issues

Brief return to music

When Farrakhan first joined the NOI, he was asked by Elijah Muhammad to put aside his musical career as a calypso singer. After 42 years, Farrakhan decided to take up the violin once more primarily due to the urging of prominent classical musician Sylvia Olden Lee.

On April 17, 1993, Farrakhan made his return concert debut with performances of the Violin Concerto in E Minor by Felix Mendelssohn. Farrakhan intimated that his performance of a concerto by a Jewish composer was, in part, an effort to heal a rift between him and the Jewish community. The New York Times music critic Bernard Holland reported that Farrakhan's performance was somewhat flawed due to years of neglect, but "nonetheless Mr. Farrakhan's sound is that of the authentic player. It is wide, deep and full of the energy that makes the violin gleam."

Health

Farrakhan announced that he was seriously ill in a letter on September 11, 2006, that was directed to his staff, Nation of Islam members, and supporters. The letter, published in The Final Call newspaper, said that doctors in Cuba had discovered a peptic ulcer. According to the letter subsequent infections caused Farrakhan to lose 35 pounds (16 kg), and he urged the Nation of Islam leadership to carry on while he recovered.

Farrakhan was released from his five-week hospital stay on January 28, 2007, after major abdominal surgery. The operation was performed to correct damage caused by side effects of a radioactive "seed" implantation procedure that he received years earlier to successfully treat prostate cancer.

Following his hospital stay, Farrakhan released a "Message of Appreciation" to supporters and well-wishers and weeks later delivered the keynote address at the Nation of Islam's annual convention in Detroit.

In December 2013, Farrakhan announced that he had not appeared publicly for two months because he had suffered a heart attack in October.

Awards and honors

2005, a Black Entertainment Television (BET) poll voted Farrakhan the 'Person of the Year'.

2006, an AP-AOL "Black Voices" poll voted Farrakhan the fifth-most important black leader, with 4 percent of the vote.

#05/11

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sirjustice288-blog · 4 years

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Uses of flower

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In making of roads and buildings such as sky-scrapper, garbage inserted in sewer water can replace the wires, and bolts/nuts inserted as previously explained in the boom process.

With bond 7 u can place cut sukuma wiki inside b4 hurling with piss, saliva or cold water or hurl the same using kale water or seldom apple fruit seed mixed with water and boom ya liqour formed or any other as u try with every procedure laid in tumblr a/c sirjustice199.

The city of Athens killed Plato and as to me he is a prophet cause most of his poems, writings and sayings were taken and still used to date lubricated in others own as in the tumblr a/c above and even most of the wise teachings of the bible and Swahili sayings and proverbs as well as songs. King of the jew to remind us of the truth and who to that city built on the hill as it will be more tolarable the sidion and tire than it at the judgement day. Now bankers were saying they are benin blooded which aint a lie but now Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia and Tz making as well planes and many nations havent posted their yet, so how many nations now u want to claim allegiance b4 now u sponsor crime as most workers wants even ya food as they have seen realities of Liquid cash being eliminated. Kuna kupanda na kushuka mwanang’u, u want us to respect u and demands people to dress good, now its u to learn to dress moderately as no other well paying job need ya attires like hotel, Casino bouncer, insurance and ministerial low paying jobs or be a dignitary which is 1 man job or dress that way on Sunday. Stacked dude. U wezi chesha na kebi both in Sex and in real life as the song link below, kinda r stucked on kebi wanting him to tolerated their weird character men as explained above, sawa gani, die if u cant hustle, me aint ya papa or kid, Govt or God who created ya.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYaLCqbuQlI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhsTB4rq1XU

They falsify crime and now resorted to petty theft to raise that bail cash 4 ruto to later put in their own investment as the public are blind not to reason as kebi while the many Kikuyu knows the exact above and Ruto cheats his tribe they got difference with The President to make more people contribute to the bail even it means getting out money off their pockets. The politician followers, if u r poor u are poor, accept reality and move on, stop such gimmicks taking the nation no-where. Putin even if u succeed in life hell fire awaits ya, that’s what i can say, as a pit latrine is emptied the on the other hole with the emptied refuses soil and leaves added not to diffuse and smell or 1 fall into the same way when hell is full is done that way and another location found, which if u dig came out like magma and mostly those areas vegetation around them are dry. So fellows mark those location as the 1 in Minneapolis is almost full looking 4 another place, Malachi 4 to remind us of the truth. Believe it or not dude, u of insane mind, the women wont help ya cause now its point blank u cant win them with empty hand dude resorting to shifting your being furious to poor citizens. Take ya arousal to ya motherfucking mothers or family, u ugly of no money when investigated.

UAE, Saudi Arabia 1st made airplane in the link below and Norway, Israel passenger plane

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELcdAHvGlPA

https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/06/23/israel-presents-first-electric-powered-passenger-plane/

https://www.arabnews.com/saudi-arabia/news/884811

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVR436-OOMc

https://www.arabianbusiness.com/transport/433886-first-made-in-uae-aircraft-ready-for-launch

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gulftoday.ae%2F-%2Fmedia%2Ftest-pics%2Fuae.ashx%3Fh%3D500%26la%3Den%26w%3D750%26hash%3D8D603C9E51C75C1387705A19B307AB32&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gulftoday.ae%2Fen%2Fnews%2F2019%2F03%2F12%2Fuae-residents-can-fly-electric-aircraft&tbnid=MmpezwhOLx9K9M&vet=12ahUKEwijqZW8p5_qAhW2gM4BHZzjBF8QMygTegUIARDCAQ..i&docid=W-zyJClGpQ0kgM&w=750&h=500&q=UAE%20made%20airplane&client=firefox-b-d&ved=2ahUKEwijqZW8p5_qAhW2gM4BHZzjBF8QMygTegUIARDCAQ

https://www.khaleejtimes.com/business/aviation/first-made-in-uae-defence-jet-ready-to-take-off-

https://www.thenational.ae/business/aviation/norway-set-to-plug-in-electric-passenger-planes-1.741883

Kenya Good than USA and why after one food like wild dogs even wanting to put up a fight in disguise with another reason, eti “waacha, set aside“ u poor but blind to see

When people are ill against ya and u don’t see or join the bad as with women, as being warned to stay away from a man with those seducing himto be his gays then, kinda, if u take a close look at that woman or man, kinda, u see spatted saliva on his face as 1 spits heavy and thick saliva on his face vindicating they are mad as masai blooded are found of that character, disassociating from the good if its against their wish as their flower sector finished using other mechanisms to make the same as well explained above in following tumblr a/c of sirjustice199. That was their pride of being 4gotten now wants to eat in others houses claiming is their land employing many yet them sidelined.

With ya window security, it can be made like with 3 - 4 like 1 cm hard metallic bars emanating from below or above to close the window so no intruder gets in as it can be automated with 1 main switch. The same can be mounted on side walls of the window either from outside or from inside or within the wall width that houses the window as the window frame. To avoid African style that gets into the head making u furious which Africans were eyeing the west to buy out of the killings in-house and theft never thinking technology can bar them like with laser lights and motion sensor alarms/lights. So they wanted to create market by making eye attracting windows 4 the same but alas their efforts are crushed into jeopardy leaving them stranded dude as in the below link pals

https://www.lowes.com/pl/Window-security-bars-Window-hardware-Hardware/4294644649

The Most buildings of USA and Europe where not built by the white-man rather green-man long time ago b4 they left 4 other planets 4 the white man to come and occupy while the remedy to making such buildings stay afloat is sprinkling from a chopper rice in the dark as they call 4 curfew to do the same and even with bridges and many roads but 4 big skyscraper African-american will see the emanating lights and see the building collapse even among those who transfigure thus robs them their dignity and pride and now even Africans have learnt how to make the same without involving laborours or machine in the boom process which now its like a poison to them heading nowhere and those buildings now old and more are above them in style so want to demolish them to build new as their is the times they can be refurbished with rice lest if u continue it collapse and the time is due now so wants to bring the crafty in mind Africans to Africa to enable the above to be done, saying this and that is rich or poor yet not the course as the course is embedded in the truths explained above if u did not know and even encourage people to share food. Stop even the African Americans now know how to make the same and its futile dude. Worker and vineyard parable to bring out reality dude.

Come Mr white-man with ya women u have planned 4 me and i show u dust, if u dont shoot me then a stone will fall in ya face synonymous with King David telling us ya character as their will be no understanding either u shoot as tresspass or if u got no gun hurl stone like him. Come on dude in daylight is see what u got or ya face not in the darkness of the night. Saying they locate peoples houses as kalenjin do to clain alergiance not knowing tea can be made in boom process bought from other tea producing nations not necesarily Kenyan 1 as in the link below

https://www.myassamtea.com/tea-plantation/top-tea-exporters/

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unholyhelbiglinked · 5 years

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Camp Beaverbrook | 020

A/N: Well, that's about it for Camp Beaverbrook. And I must say, I'm super proud of myself for actually sticking with it even if I did go off schedule a little bit. Either way, I want to thank everyone who has stuck with me during this absolutely insane reimagining of classic 80's horror films. You guys are truly amazing and supportive and I'll never forget that.

(Oh, and uhhh I'm going to take a month or two to focus on getting my other stories filled out before I tackle the sequel, but the girl's stories don't' end here. I'll answer any lingering questions you have, just keep your eyes peeled for what happens next. Because we all know final girls don't necessarily stay final girls)

READ ON AO3 | READ FROM THE START

Chloe Beale had read somewhere that Hospitals were liminal spaces. An area akin to a waiting room, or a train station, even a bus stop across from a cemetery in the middle of New Orleans. A place that was meant for transition. Somewhere no one stopped for too long, heading to the afterlife or simply to the nurses at the front desk who reluctantly handed over discharge papers.

Chloe felt like she would be here forever. There was no second stop for her, instead, there was a dark examination room where she had been separated from the rest of the world. There was a slight hum from the x-ray chart that lit the room in a blue glow. A slight breeze against the robe that she was instructed to put on- they had taken her clothes and stuck them in a little clear baggie. She hugged herself closer against the sterile air.

Parchment paper against the examination table was stuck to her bare skin. She waited for a knock, or simply for the slate wooden door to open. A doctor of a police officer- that’s what she was expecting. Someone to handcuff her or probe at her already stinging injuries. Anything but this stalemate.

She tried to count the number of casualties like sheep with sloppily painted numbers against fleece. There was Jane, Jane who could have gotten lost in the woods but couldn’t have been a simple accident. Then Gail- sweet Gail who had run the camp in her stead for years and years. And Wilkens. A man she didn’t know but felt as if she did, smelling of cigar smoke and spilled blood.

“Ms. Beale?” It was a voice instead of a knock, but the door seemed to creak open immediately after that. She jumped despite knowing that someone would be coming for her. It was the same nurse that was dressed in washed pink scrubs. The one who had given her the robe and looked at her with inept solitude. “Sorry to startle you but, the doctor would like to see you now.”

Chloe nodded and fought back a wince at the pain it caused. She felt stiff, the bruise that wrapped around her skin like a choker was burning hot like a branding iron and she fought the urge to run her fingers over the raw spot.

The doctor seemed to be a woman straight out of med school. Her hair was darkened, almost black under the blue glow. It was thrown up in a messy bun but strands fell evenly into her ghostly stare. Her face was bare of makeup but pretty, a white lab coat over a button-down shirt that was an even forest green. Her nametag read Dr. Mary Saxe.

She had a soft way about her, but not obnoxiously so like the bubblegum nurse who had tried her best to make Chloe feel at ease. It didn’t work so well, but this woman had a presence around her. An authority that was otherwise unmatched.

“I don’t want you to speak, okay? Not before I can take a look at your wounds.”

Chloe didn’t do anything this time. She didn’t answer or nod. Instead, she just watched the woman wet her hands under the sink and slide on a pair of purple nylon gloves. She didn’t bother pulling up a seat, instead, she stood right in front of the young girl, eyes hard and focused.

She couldn’t’ help the sharp inhale that filled her lungs as Dr. Saxe made the first contact. She traced the ring of clotted blood with delicacy before applying certain pressure beneath where Chloe thought here tonsils were. Before she got her tonsils removed as a kid, a lot of other doctors poked around there too. This time it brought tears to her eyes and she felt a certain heir of embarrassment, to choose now to cry. To break over a soreness rather than when the actual cord wrapped around her throat.

“Right,” The doctor seemed unphased. “I’m going to need to do some x-rays, make sure nothing got crushed or fractured. Amy here is going to get some pain medication and that should stop the discomfort.”

Dr. Mary Saxe did something unexpected then, she put her hand on Chloe’s shoulder. Maybe in an attempt of comfort or to get the girl to focus on something other than the tears that dripped off her chin and soaked into the ugly turquoise gown she wore. “Chloe, we’re going to catch the guy who did this, alright? You’re safe here. I don’t want you to believe otherwise.”

Chloe knit her eyebrows together, staring at the stressed features of the stranger in front of her. The woman who had such intense focus. The one who still had her hand on her shoulder and her eyes level. She mustered the courage to speak- much against the woman’s orders.

“He’s… dead.”

A flash of horror shifted to understanding in a moments time, she nodded her head, squeezing Chloe’s shoulder. Did she know? Had Chloe been the only one not to give a statement in the nightmare that took place over these last few weeks? She had a feeling that all four of them had been separated for a reason- Dr. Mary Saxe turning to leave before Chloe grasped onto the fabric of her lab coat.

“Emily?”

“Your friend.” She responded, eyes flashing down to the death grip Chloe held. “She’s lost a lot of blood. The shrapnel split an artery and we stitched it up as well as we could, but we had to put her in a medically induced coma. It’s up to her to wake up now.”

It was Chloe’s turn to nod and think, her stare focused on the cross-sections that the tiled floor created. She heard the door open and shut and acknowledged the presence of the nurse who handed over a Dixie cup of water and a little orange pill. It burned on the way down.

Beca Mitchell was slumped against a chair in a way her father would call despicable. Her back was touching the wall through the open design and her legs were spread against blue scrubs that were too big on her. A sickeningly gross blue that made her look pale, her bare feet cold against the tile floor.

They let her take a shower.

She made one of the orderlies sit on the toilet seat while it filled up with a toxic mist, heavy and hard to breathe through. The woman made small talk with her about the weather and how it was unseasonably cold for this time of the year before moving into the topic of her newborn grandbaby. Beca had allowed herself to focus on her soothing words as she stared up at the stream of water, refusing to blink, watching as the muck and blood washed down the drain. Her chest ached.

Beca stared blankly at the floor in the hallway. She hadn’t looked up as the food cart passed, or when another nurse handed her a Dixie cup with a little orange pill. She tipped her head back and swallowed it and crushed the frail paper between her fingers.

The girl didn’t glance up with the chair next to her suddenly became occupied with another. Instead, she stared, stared at nothing in particular and thought about the throbbing in her nose and the throbbing in her heart. She had shot someone- nonfatally.

“What if you’re right?” She finally whispered, “About me being a terrible person. About it being in my blood.”

Aubrey Posen drew in a calculated breath. She had on her own set of scrubs, the cut on her hairline had been stitched cleanly and was coated in a thick smelling medicine to quell the pain. Her arms were bruised, and her hair was wet- thrown into a dark ponytail. Despite her injuries, she sat up straight.

Beca sniffed and turned to face the girl completely. “We learned about Aristotle in summer school. How he thought people were born amoral- not good or bad. It’s something that’s learned over time and cultivated and” She took a shaky breath. “What if I was just born bad, and that’s what made it so easy for me to shoot Jesse?”

“That theory has been argued amongst centuries, It’s not even-“She got ahead of herself, stilling her thoughts. “It was easy for you to pull the trigger because someone you cared about was in danger. You weighed the options and no matter what, you didn’t fire the killing shot. Don’t blame yourself for helping us live.”

“Is that what you’re telling yourself?” Beca’s voice was watery. Aubrey grimaced and looked away. “About what happened in the car? That you did what you did because Emily was going to die if we hadn’t of driven away?”

They returned themselves to the quiet that wasn’t quite silence. Aubrey slumped in her seat and tapped her fingers against the armrest. The phones rang at the reception desk a few corridors down. The machines beeped in unison and a man with an awful cough hacked up his second lung for the night.

Then there was the sound of loafers tapping against the linoleum and Beca’s Chest seized. She wasn’t sure if all people in law enforcement were required to wear the same type of shoes or if there was a convention every year under big-top tents to purchase them. He walked with vigor and purpose.

Detective Luis Desmond, Beca remembered. She had seen him more than once at her hearings, his suits always pressed neatly and his hair cut close to the scalp. His dark skin popped against the lavender tie he wore, opting out of the blazer jacket that hugged his frame in court. Wilkens and Desmond shared cigars as they leaned against the car that was wrapped in neon tape at this point.

Beca pushed herself up in her seat and ignored the discomfort it created as the scrubs rolled up against her skin. Desmond didn’t say a word as he sat across from the two girls who cast a wary glance between one another before returning their attention to him.

“Well, girls, I’m going to be frank with you. None of this looks good.” He formed his fingers into a teepee and leaned forward against his knees. It made his pant legs ride up and expose his black socks, but not quite far enough to show his ankles. “We have a dead camp director, a dead federal agent, a body burned beyond recognition and one with an arrow expertly shoved into his throat.”

“We told you everything we know.”

“I’m not finished yet.” He said sternly. “There’s a blown-up shed, a dead little girl with parents who just want answers, and a sizeable dent in a car that you stole.”

There was enough quiet that followed to inform them that he was done now. Beca didn’t’ think it a good idea to mention that it wasn’t technically grand theft auto if the man who held the title was gutted like a fish. She also didn’t’ find it the right time to disclose the fact that she was about to lose the rest of the lake water in her stomach all over those nice leather loafers.

“We’ve called your parents, and then your guardians. They’re all on the way.” Desmond said with a slight twinge in his voice before he stood. “I’ll advise the four of you not to leave town in the following months. It was nice to see you again, Rebeca.”

“Pleasure.” She croaked out, giving a halfhearted wave. He walked back the way he came, and they watched with laser focus before he pushed through the double doors and vanished completely.

“He’s just trying to scare us.” Aubrey exhaled in a shaky breath.

“Yeah, it fucking worked.” Beca slumped further in her chair until she could feel the cold air against exposed skin again, her eyes trained on a little dip in the floor in a space that seemed entirely too liminal.

#Beca Mitchell #Chloe Beale #bechloe #bechloe fic rec #bechloe fanfiction #junksen #junksen fanfic #Emily Junk #Aubrey Posen #summer camp au #Camp AU #fanfiction #Pitch Perfect #pitch perfect fanfiction

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discworldtour · 6 years

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It was explained to us that Newton had been supplanted by Einstein, Lamarck by Darwin, Freud by Skinner... So we were told that theories were constantly being supplanted, but that the observations on which they were based were reliable. This is the reverse of the truth. No teacher pointed out that many, perhaps most, of the basic assumptions of our intellectual world were scientific theories that had survived criticism... from the place of Earth and Sol in the Milky Way galaxy to the fertilization theory of human conception to subatomic physics producing atom bombs... to Ohm’s Law and the electrical energy grid, to medical tricks like the germ theory of disease, all the way to X-rays and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), not to mention chemical theories that reliably gave us nylon, polythene and detergents. These theories go unnoticed because they have become defaults, so completely accepted as ‘true’ that we fail to paint them with emotional tags, and simply build them into our intellectual toolkit. Even though no teacher pointed out that they were scientific successes, they constitute much of the (regrettably but unavoidably) uninspiring parts of school science.

-- on theories that survive | Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch

#science of discworld iii #darwin's watch #discworld #terry pratchett #quote

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papermoonloveslucy · 7 years

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LUCY AND WALLY COX

S2;E21 ~ February 9, 1970

Directed by Jay Sandrich ~ Written by Milt Josefsberg and Ray Singer

Synopsis

Harry's old friend Moose has a shy son who Lucy helps bring out of his shell – until a plan to help him bravely foil a robbery goes awry!

Regular Cast

Lucille Ball (Lucy Carter), Gale Gordon (Harrison Otis Carter)

Desi Arnaz Jr. (Craig Carter) and Lucie Arnaz (Kim Carter) do not appear in this episode, although they are billed in the opening credits.

Guest Cast

Wally Cox (Wally Manley) was a character actor best remembered for being a panelist on TV's “The Hollywood Squares” (1965-73) as well as his hit series “Mr. Peepers” (1953-55). He played a nervous musician on “Lucy Conducts the Symphony” (TLS S2;E13) and a reformed safe cracker in “Lucy and the Ex-Con” (S1;E15). He will make two more guest-star appearances on “Here's Lucy.” Cox died of a heart attack in 1973 at age 48.

Cox was known for playing less-than-masculine characters, so the name ‘Manley’ is a bit of an inside joke. Despite being billed in the title by his real name, Cox never played himself on his many guest appearances with Lucille Ball. Cox’s character doesn’t enter the story until 10 minutes into the 24 minute program and receives a warm round of applause from the studio audience.

LUCILLE BALL: “I adored Wally Cox. I worked with him every chance I got!”

Alan Hale Jr. (Moose Manley, Wally’s Father) is best remembered as the Skipper on “Gilligan's Island” (1964-92). Hale previously appeared as a Fire Captain on “Lucy Puts Out a Fire at the Bank” (TLS S2;E9) the year before he started playing the Skipper. Hale made his film debut at age 12. He died in 1990 at age 68.

Moose and Harry are old college buddies. He runs a detective agency with branch offices in 30 big cities.

Chuck Hicks (First Stuntman, left) was a stunt man and actor who was seen in “Lucy the Stunt Man” (TLS S4;E5). Hicks was a long-time stunt double for Brian Dennehy. This is his only time on “Here’s Lucy.” Boyd Red Morgan (Bruce, Second Stuntman, right) is an actor and stunt man who was last seen in “Lucy and John Wayne” (TLS S5;E10), with whom he did eleven films. This is the first of his four episodes of “Here’s Lucy.”

In the 1970s, the first name Bruce was the generic name of a stereotypical gay man (complete with limp wrist and a lisp) in jokes about homosexual males. Here, Harry twice questions the name incredulously, having a hard time associating it with a masculine stunt man. The 1969 studio audience laughs, indicating they also make the connection.

Gil Perkins (Baby Face Johnson, First Crook, right) was aboard the train when Lucy and Ricky headed home from California in “The Great Train Robbery” (ILL S5;E5). Prior to that he was seen in The Big Street (1942) and The Fuller Brush Girl (1950) with Lucille Ball. This is his only appearance on “Here's Lucy.” X. Brands (Lefty Logan, Second Crook, left) was his real name! A family tradition held over from when an ancestor added the letter ‘X’ to his name to differentiate himself from another man of the same name in town. X Brands was known for playing American Indians, despite not being one. This is his only appearance with Lucille Ball.

Harvey Stone (Waiter) was born just three weeks after Lucille Ball in 1911. He had appeared in two plays at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse in 1968. He will be featured in one more episode, also directed by Jay Sandrich. In 1974 Stone died of a heart attack while performing on a cruise ship and was buried at sea.

The waiter has no dialogue, but his face says it all!

There are a few diners in the background of the Cafe George, but their faces cannot be seen.

This is the first of three episodes to be directed by Jay Sandrich. The year after this episode, Sandrich won an Emmy Award for his writing on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” He won again for the same show in 1973 and earned two more Emmys for his writing on “The Cosby Show” in 1985 and 1986. Sandrich first joined the Desilu team in 1956 as Assistant Director of “I Love Lucy” and “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour.” Sandrich remembers:

“I was so young and caught in the middle of America's favorite couple breaking up. Psychologically, I didn't know how to handle it because I was in the middle. They all were wonderful people but naturally there was tension.”

In April 1968, Gale Gordon joined Wally Cox as one of “The Hollywood Squares.” Host Peter Marshall had played Lucy Carmichael’s brother-in-law on “The Lucy Show,” so Marshall and Gordon had that in common! Marshall would also star in “Happy Anniversary and Goodbye” in 1974. Also in the grid that week was Jack Cassidy, who had guest starred on “The Lucy Show” in 1965.

Although Hale and Cox play father and son, they were only three years apart. Moose Manley says that his son is 33 years old. In reality, this episode was aired a week before Wally Cox celebrated his 45th birthday.

Moose says that in college, Harry was known as ‘Blubber’ because he was overweight and adds that Harry still holds the college record for swallowing 86 goldfish in ten minutes. Goldfish swallowing was a fad of the 1920s and ‘30s college students probably during initiation rituals or on dares. This unusual trend has been previously mentioned on other “Lucy” shows. Harry later recalls that they went on panty raids, another college stunt popular with fraternity boys during the '20s and '30s.

When Harry thinks Moose is using blackmail to allow Lucy time off to help his son with his girl problems, Moose replies “You bet your bippy it is!” The word “bippy” means “ass” and the euphemism was used as early as 1880, but was re-popularized by “Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In,” “Here's Lucy's” competition on ABC. In May 1969 a song titled “You Bet Your Sweet Bippy” was released. This is just one of many “Laugh-In” references on “Here's Lucy.”

Story Time with Hilda & Madge - When Lucy hears that Wally is afraid of girls, she relates a story of a high school friend named Hilda who had a girl-shy brother. Moose blackmails Harry by threatening to tell Lucy a salacious story about a girl in Harry’s past named Madge.

Moose gets a phone call from his secretary, Miss Hurlow. Miss Hurlow was also the name of Robert Goulet's secretary who was played by Mary Wickes in “Lucy and Robert Goulet” (TLS S6;E8, above).

After the two stunt men completely destroy Harry’s office, one of them says “We’ve got to get it out of our systems. We’re not allowed to be violent on TV anymore!” In 1969, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence submitted a report that brought television violence under careful scrutiny. That same year, Senator John Pastore requested that the Surgeon General appoint a committee to conduct an inquiry into television violence and its effect on children. Clearly this topic was in the news, and as a result gets a laugh from the studio audience.

The warehouse seems to be stocked with children's toys and games (as well as lamps and boxes of nylon). The Ideal board game Seven Keys can be seen on the table near the door. It was based on the TV game show of the same name (which, in turn, was based on Chutes and Ladders) that ran from 1961 to 1965 on ABC and was hosted by Jack Narz.

There is also a Roadmaster V gold wagon by AMF. American Machine and Foundry (AMF) Roadmaster division was primarily known for bicycles, but also created many wheeled children’s toys. This is the fifth iteration of their gold pull toy wagon, manufactured in the 1960s.

As usual, Lucy has no control of hoses and Harry ends the episode soaking wet! To be fair, so does Lucy!

Episodes featuring stunts recall when Lucy Carmichael took a job as a stunt person named Iron Man Carmichael on “The Lucy Show.” In “Here's Lucy,” however, Lucille Ball leaves the stunt work to others!

The gag of Harry’s glass door shattering was previously done to Mr. Mooney on “Lucy Gets Involved” (TLS S6;E17).

Oops! Picking up the menus, Lucille Ball knocks over the salt and pepper shakers. Nothing spills out (likely they were empty) and Lucy doesn't bother to right them, knowing that the entire contents of the table will soon end up on the floor anyway!

What Month Is It? Although the episode aired in February, the calendar in the storage room shows artwork of a line of graduating students in black cap and gown holding diplomas, usually indicative of May or June. The calendar year remains in soft focus throughout.

What's My Line? Moose says he runs a detective agency, but is here supplying security guards for a warehouse, quite a different business!

Wanted Dead or...? Moose recognizes Baby Face and Lefty as “the most notorious killers in the country.” If that is so, why are they robbing toy warehouses? Also, they are armed with guns yet are easily overpowered by Wally and Lucy who only have toys to defend themselves!

Redecorating! The model ship that usually sits on the shelf next to the office doors has been replaced by colorful vases and feathers. This is because the stunt men are going to wreck the office and need breakaway glass for their demonstration. The water cooler has also been removed for this episode.

Where The Floor Ends! During the destructive demo, the camera pulls back a bit too far revealing where the edge of the wall-to-wall carpeting meets the cement of the soundstage floor.

Gimme a Break (but not yet)! The glass in the door shatters while Harry is opening the door to leave, instead of when he shuts it, slightly marring the timing of the gag.

“Lucy and Wally Cox” rates 3 Paper Hearts out of 5

This is a moderately enjoyable episode, if only to see TV favorites Cox and Hale play an unlikely father and son. It isn't particularly funny, however, and the outcome is predictable. There are also dated jokes about masculinity that haven’t aged very well.

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binsofchaos · 4 years

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‘I Believe in Love’: Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Final Year, In Her Own Words

Introduction by Garance Franke-Ruta. Jump to the start of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s essay here.

The late Elizabeth Wurtzel was best known for her memoirs and essays, especially Prozac Nation and Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, but after attending Yale Law School in her late 30s she also enjoyed having a voice in the political arena. She was as much an original there as everywhere else, and between 2010 and 2012 she wrote a series of pieces for me at The Atlantic.

A feminist and a New Yorker who had really lived, she looked at the world in a different way from all the boys on the bus in Washington. And she was funny. She would send long text messages written on her smartphone while she was walking through Washington Square Park, an emissary from a more vivid and creative world than the boxy K Street buildings I would pass en route to my office in the Watergate. Sometimes her stories would come in like that too, texted in graf by graf, and I’d knit the passages together in what seemed like the right order and ask for some connective language. The thoughts were always razor-sharp; the understanding of human nature acute.

Over time our editing relationship moved into a long-distance friendship. We met for dinner at a restaurant in Chelsea, outside of course so her dog could be nestled at her feet. She had somehow managed to find a lipstick with my name on it — Guerlain’s Garance — and purchased us two tubes encased in elegant silver that sat heavy in the hand. She wore hers to dinner, and when I went to the restroom, I changed my color too, making us lipstick twins. It was how she was and in many ways the secret to her success: In addition to being wildly talented, she overcompensated for being so difficult and never totally in control by being astonishingly thoughtful, and kind, and, well, seductive. She was a seductive personality; hard not to love even as she could be hard to be close to.

When I started working at GEN this fall and living in New York full time, I reached out to her. “I’m in remission!” she’d said brightly when we first reconnected, three years after last seeing each other and nearly five years after she first learned she had the BRCA gene and breast cancer. We drank red wine on her balcony overlooking a giant earthen pit in the ground: The future NY offices of Netflix. We went to dinner at Il Buco on Bond Street (her suggestion); I could feel she was lonely. She and her husband Jim Freed had separated and were in the process of divorcing, a not so happy ending to the happily ever after story she had been astonished to stumble into in 2015, and something she was still figuring out how to write about. She started sending me things she had written as we talked about her writing a piece about Gen X politics and the 2020 race.

“I am intimate with the dirt,” she wrote of the Netflix pit. “It has infiltrated everything. It is all over me and under me. It is Love Canal, sewage from the Mississippi, cigarette butts, marijuana ash, slave remains, rats, mice, Three Mile Island, Mount Etna, Mount Saint Helen, Dust Bowl, Adam, Eve, serpent, Satan, Chernobyl, Berlin Wall, acid rain, asbestos, uranium, geraniums, 9/11, 7/11, Donner Party, bird beaks, pigeon claws, squirrel tails, gerbil puke, hamster wheels, insulation, Saran Wrap, Mason Pearson bristles, dental floss, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Mafia hits washed up from the East River, syringes, works, the residue at the bottom of the empty bag of dope, coal waste, cookie crumbs, broken bottles, rusty nails, Bataan Death March, Manila massacre, Boston Tea Party, frog legs, goldfish, mutant ninja turtles, alligators from Florida, red algae, yellow fever, Agent Orange, bubonic plague, gold teeth, silver spoons, copper wires, iron ore, Crest with fluoride, whitening strips, stripper tips, dollar bills, twenties laced with cocaine, subway tokens, expired MetroCards with unused fare, tickets to see Star Wars in 1976, bicentennial souvenirs, gutta-percha, cat guts, doll parts, golf balls, tennis racket strings, cashmere socks, polyester, rayon, pylon, nylon, Mylar, warped vinyl, scratched CDs, crispy leaves, shredded lettuce, tarnished keys, queen bees, xerox paper, pepper spray, Prozac pills, poppers, pooper scoopers, hula hoops, leis, fecal matter, aborted fetuses, snot, rot, cots, bots, shot glass shards, broken windows, chimney smoke, dice, playing cards, poker chips, lollipop sticks, toothpicks, used tissues, dirty handkerchiefs, bandanna threads, kite pine needles, kite strings, toilet water, wolf fangs, sunburn peel, hangnails, cavities, skin, scabs, split ends, fur balls, chicken bones, dissected cadavers, wisdom teeth, crash test dummies, Big Bang, Little Miss Muffet, Humpty Dumpty, Rip Van Winkle, bog wood, petrified forest, oyster shells, freshwater pearls, blood diamonds, Star rubies, asteroids, primordial ooze, love letters, promises kept and broken.”

Very soon the piece she’d wanted to write about Gen X politics started to slip. The cancer was back. There were so many tests and scans to undergo. I told her not to worry about writing it and was surprised when she filed. She said it was a good distraction from having cancer. She badly wanted to interview Beto O’Rourke, but by the time he arrived in New York City where they might have had a face-to-face — the Gen X skate-punk candidate and the Gen X icon — he was already getting ready to drop out of the race.

She sent me a long piece about her past year, about her impending divorce and her marriage and her mother and Donald Trump. It was from something longer she was working on, she said.

We talked about her writing an additional passage when she recovered from brain surgery and running the piece on Medium. “I suppose I have to add something about this, since so much of the piece is about cancer,” she texted. “You know, of all my failures of imagination, I never wondered what a brain tumor is like. So I could not have guessed it was this atrocious, the dizziness and the pain.”

Her recoveries from the relentless march of the disease during her final, dreadful month would prove to be brief.

After her first brain surgery — she had two to cope with her metastatic breast cancer and subsequent complications — which she described as a “brain resection,” she was astonishingly herself. She was funny and poetic and articulate and in good spirits. Still dizzy and unstable — the tumor had impacted her balance center and left her clutching the furniture as she walked during her last night in her own home — but also still herself. She laughed with her mother, who took video and pictures of her in the hospital and helped coordinate, along with Jim and some of her oldest friends from college, a parade of sun-up to way past winter sundown visitors so that she would never feel alone.

And the night before the surgery, Jim was the one she stayed with. He was the one who took care of Alistair, her dog, and her black cat, Arabella. When I saw him in the hospital, he was entirely attuned to her and what she might need so that she could recover and have, in the unspoken best-case scenario, another year.

“I can’t get over how great my husband has been with this. He has made it possible for me to get better and not worry about anything,” she wrote in mid-December, after the surgery. “He loves you so much it’s clear,” I texted back, thinking of how attentive he had been, how he was arranging visits with so many people, that look on his face that you cannot fake. “I think so,” she texted back. “It’s good you see. I love him so much.”

But the past year had been a hard one. This is what she had written about it. She had shown it to Jim too, and he agreed, as did a number of her oldest friends, that she’d want it published. She loved to be published.

I Believe in Love

By Elizabeth Wurtzel

Greetings from the chaotic land of marriage come undone.

The caravansary is dismantling, toothpicks flying everywhere, the bubblegum that held it together is unstuck.

Everything is falling.

My husband moved out at the end of December [2018], as the calendar flipped from last year to this [2019], while I was in Miami Beach, strolling the walkways in the shocking morning sun and under the nighttime Van Gogh sky, away from it all.

I knew he was moving out, but still: I was surprised.

I did not see that the game was over. I did not know the clock was running. I never lose, but I do run out of time. It turns out this was basketball and not baseball.

While I looked away, my marriage fell apart.

I fell off my keel. I lost my kilter. I was a kite without a string.

Maybe it’s better.

It is a peaceful purple without him here. But psychedelic with disarray.

Marriage is an organizing principle. It is flow. It is coffee in the morning. It is who walks the dog. It is HBO at night.

And love. Don’t forget that.

Now I am an ombré mess of a person. I am missed appointments and canceled meetings. I am the thing I forgot to do. I am hanging on by a strand of Drybar dry-shampooed hair.

All day long I have to ask people to forgive me, I am flailing and failing at it all. Forgive me, I beg, as I hope my untweezed eyebrows will. Maybe soon, I will even tug at a few strays.

Or maybe wild is the way.

🖤🖤🖤

I still think of Jim as this sweet person I married. He is my trust fall. He is my emergency contact. He is my next of kin. He is my valentine. He is my birthday dinner. He is my secret sharer. He is my husband.

I do not know him anymore so I do not know myself. Who are my friends? Where is my family? I have fallen into a crevasse of nobody nowhere.

I am estranged and strange, strangled up in blue.

I do not want to feel this way. I am going through the five stages of grief all at once, which Reddit strings have no doubt turned into 523. They are a collision course, a Robert Moses plan, a metropolitan traffic system of figuring it out.

I feel bad and mad and sad.

Is this a festival of insight or a clusterfuck of stupid? I change my mind all the time about this and about everything else.

I got married because I was done with crazy. But here it is, back again, the revenant I cannot shake. I feel like it’s 1993, when my heart had a black eye all the time.

26 is a boxing match of the soul.

I did not expect bruises at 52.

🖤🖤🖤

I have blamed myself. I have blamed my husband. I have blamed cancer. I have blamed marijuana. I have blamed sexism. I have blamed Charlottesville. I have blamed my in-laws. I have blamed several men named David. I have blamed my mother who lied to me my whole life about who my father is.

Who would I be if I did not blame Donald Trump?

I am angry all the time since the election of 2016, like it happened to me, like I was gang-raped by Michigan. I don’t want to be angry, but so there, I am.

Who don’t I hate?

Who won’t I blame?

If you are standing there, I blame you.

It is not conservative against liberal.

It is everybody against everyone. Here we are, in it together, alone.

The problem is not arguments I have with people who voted for Trump, who I don’t know anyway. The trouble is the way all of us who agree about everything are bickering. Oh, the narcissism of small differences.

I remember not that long ago when the world was not political. I was part of landmark litigation that was all about a team of Republicans and Democrats working together. I loved everybody. We were all on the same side.

What Alamo did I not forgive? What Masada did I not get over?

Now there is no microaggression too small for me to scream about so the next four neighborhoods can hear.

My husband does something and I am affronted like it matters.

I am sure he does not know how I feel.

And maybe he doesn’t.

But what does any of this have to do with why we got married? We got married to be in it together. Polarization has even invaded love.

I have anger fatigue. I am sick of sick. Like everyone.

The emotional toll of the world we live in is going to do all of us in.

But politics is not about conflict.

Politics is about making the world a better place.

🖤🖤🖤

How could my mother keep a secret for 50 years? What makes someone do that?

She buried herself in it. She grew a wild Victorian garden with thorny bushes of rose and purple larkspur and red snapdragon. There was a lush meadow of lavender that gave a whiff of Aix-en-Provence en ét��. The dandelions ran rampant and the daffodils glowed yellow like Big Bird.

But underneath it all, beneath the lilies of the valley and the rows of geranium, there is dirt.

There is a secret.

I am a bastard. I am her bastard daughter.

There are things that come along that are a shock.

I believed something for nearly half a century. It was a lie.

I was conned.

I was wrong about myself.

I did not know who I am.

My mother told no one.

It was a lie she told for so long it became true and the secret faded to no-memory. She misremembered who my father was. She did not think it mattered.

When it all came out in 2016, not long after I got married, just after my real father died, my mother could not see what my hysteria was about. She did not understand why I was stunned.

All the while I was trying not to feel the worst way ever, trying not to be overwhelmed by the explosion, my mother could not figure out what was bothering me.

After all, she is the nuclear physicist.

My mother is like everyone else. She thinks she is normal. She is sure her behavior makes sense. She believes she does the right thing. Since she cannot imagine that this is not the case, she is surprised to find out that, yes, she makes bombs.

I scream at my mother, “What’s wrong with you?!”

I do that and she does not know what I mean.

She says, “Oh get over it.”

Her eyes widen until they look like goggles on an herbivore. She is put upon. She cannot believe we have to discuss this yet again.

“Omigod yet again!”

When will I quit badgering her?

I say, “You lied to me.”

She says, “It wasn’t a lie.”

“Then what?”

“It was a decision!”

Any relationship founded on a lie is doomed. Or not a lie, according to her, which is another lie, a lie about a lie.

That is how it is between us. We are living in the doom.

And yet, we are still at it. My mother and I refuse to give up. She is my only parent. She is all I have.

She made sure of that.

This is the most painful thing ever.

She has made so many inexplicable decisions over the years that I know about, and now I see the ones I did not know.

And yet I love her more than anyone else in the world.

She is it for me. She is in the way of everything. I should be interested in my husband, but how can he compete with how much I want to figure out the Once that started all that is upon a time?

🖤🖤🖤

I was a welter of emotions.

I was so emotional.

When I found out that my father is not my father, that my mother lied to me my whole life, that there was so much I did not know, a bomb dropped in my life. Bombs, really, aerial bombardment. It was the Battle of Manila: bazookas, flamethrowers, grenades, tanks, cannons, howitzers, banzai charges, kamikaze tactics, I was shocked and stunned with feeling.

I did not know what to do.

I became a raging lunatic.

I was a mettle of rage.

My rage is my retinue. My rage is a filthy velveteen train I drag around with me, carelessly. It is my ruby tiara. It is my rainbow and my pot of gold.

My rage is cream. It makes Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee that my grandmother brewed in a percolator on the breakfront in the dining room taste not half bad.

It is the coloratura harmony to my singsong days.

My rage is my conscience. I insist on my right to feel.

But I got caught in a Möbius strip of emotion. I was gone round the bend of scream.

It was stuplimity.

🖤🖤🖤

My marriage is crushed beneath the weight of so much. It is delicate, like all relationships. It is not one of those fine elms that blows with the gusts and does not snap.

We are a scattering of branches on the lawn. We are deadwood.

Oh, there is a lot that holds us together, the love and the hours. We got married during chemotherapy. We are bound.

But my husband is not who he was.

Yes, I know: It is always like that. The sorrow of unraveling is the stranger you are facing. What happened? I want to scream. Where did you go?

My husband had a softness. I will not compare it to the feel of cotton balls or the touch of silk charmeuse, because it is better. He was new to love. I could tell. I could see. He was surprised. He did not see me coming. He did not know I was interested. He was alone in a room. His life was small. He had the same six friends he always had. He was shy. He was not brave. He had no expectations.

He was lovely.

The beginning is always like honey, liquid and sweet.

But he was open.

He was not wounded by a million heartaches.

He had not been through it all.

He did not have a wretched past.

He was 34, which is not young. Younger than I was, but a lot could have happened by then.

It had not.

He was fresh.

There was nothing I would not do for him.

There was nothing I did not want for him.

We met in October and got engaged in May.

We knew.

And now he knows he has had enough.

It has been too much.

🖤🖤🖤

Most of all, it is not easy to be married to someone with cancer.

I feel for my husband.

Cancer is so big. Everyone is prostrate before its deadly enormity. It is the answer to every question. It is the reason why. Is it an excuse or is it real? Who is anyone to argue? Cancer is a bully. It is an elephantine disease of body, mind, soul. My husband moved a half a mile away from it. I would love to do the same.

I am stuck until the end.

I do not know what he expected when he married me when I was ill. I am sorry that it has not been what he wanted. I am sorry that I hurt him.

After I got cancer, I was not the same.

I wanted to be.

I wanted my life to go back to what it was.

I was so lively. I was so lovely.

I was so busy. I was so social.

But I could not do it.

No surprise, I changed.

I was withdrawn during chemotherapy and my world became small. It contracted like starvation. It is hard to get back what is lost. It is more difficult still to begin anew.

I tried. So hard. I called. I emailed. I texted. I showed up.

But there was a diminishment.

Cancer is an ecosystem. It is a crime spree.

Things broke. My radius. My fibula. My tibia. My spirit.

My cancer came back a year after it went away.

You think people are nice about it? No.

Cancer is misunderstood.

Everyone says the wrong thing. Which is what they do so much anyway.

Then I say the wrong thing back.

There we are, bumper cars of mismatched words.

I can’t believe the stupid things people tell me in an effort to be kind, about something hard they had to deal with that is not the same as having cancer.

The worst thing anyone can do is tell me they are sorry about my cancer.

I don’t want anyone feeling sorry for me. About anything. Don’t apologize unless you have done something wrong. It is nasty to feel sorry for anyone for any reason because it pushes her away.

Mostly sorry is just a thing to say. Anything else would be better, including I don’t know what to say.

It is always people who are the problem. What else? Our suffering is small compared to our misunderstandings with others, how they fail to give us a break, know what it’s like, judge us fairly, see the world the way we do. It is not even cancer or especially cancer. It is especially this and even that. If you are looking for absolution, you are going to have to forgive yourself.

I have chainmail from years of frustrating conversations, of people who think something bad has happened to me.

I don’t see it that way.

You could tell me everything that’s bad about cancer, like that it’s cancer, but you could not convince me that cancer has been bad for me.

Cancer has made me optimistic.

These are the days of miracles and wonders, of biopharma fireworks, of immunotherapy wow.

I have been saved.

I am miraculous me.

I will skate figure eights into infinity.

I am all claws I am all fangs.

I am not afraid of cancer. I think cancer should be afraid of me.

This past October [2018], I had a tumor in my shoulder bone that was 5 inches: big! It was threatening to break it.

And worse.

My cancer antigens were at 205, when 25 is as high as the level can go.

I had meetings in the World Trade Center while all this was going on. I hate it down there. Skyscrapers as grave markers. It is an ominous place.

When I went for help in Philadelphia at the Basser Center for BRCA at the University of Pennsylvania, only Alistair, my service dog, was with me.

My husband said he had to work.

My marriage had already come undone.

I had stereotactic radiation at Memorial Sloan Kettering. It took only three sessions to zap the tumor away. The treatment saved me, but I have a five-inch hole in my bone that looks like a cave in the Thai jungle.

When my husband moved out, I was still healing. I have a rotator cuff tear and pain from the long way home.

🖤🖤🖤

This is a love story.

Every marriage is a love story.

People who run off to Vegas after knowing each other for 10 days and find a drunk outside the Sands casino to be their witness — they really mean it. Marriage is a big gesture. There is no reason to do it except: love.

It is effusive.

I am sorry I failed.

I am sorry for this confederacy of catastrophe.

I am sorry for it all.

I think that my husband can’t believe I hurt. I know what I’m like: I have a powerful personality, it’s true. But he got me.

He made a vow to love me in sickness and in health.

There was great love between us.

And love is hard to stop.

We made a commitment for when we could not remember why we did.

He decided enough.

I am a monotheist. I am in it for life. I am in everything for life. If you don’t stop me, I will not stop myself. I have the kind of faith that you can only have if you have talked your way out of trouble all along.

I feel so much and too much. Deep in my radiated bones.

I cannot believe it is like this with my husband and not like it was that long ago on Halloween, our first date, which he did not know was a date, maybe it was maybe it wasn’t, he showed up at my door not knowing anything at all.

We were resting on our future arms, we were like people who have never read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, have never seen City of God, have never heard Exile In Guyville, oh what lay ahead.

I remember my husband in the beginning, I know the man I married, I insist he is still there somewhere.

I keep peeling for the pentimento.

Or has this all been a fraud?

Love gone wrong feels like a confidence crime.

That is the worst of it.

Do I have an electron microscope or am I blinded? Do I see more clearly now or is this a distortion? I could ask that about the whole wide world.

Sex and race look different since Trump was elected. We know all the things that we never knew. We were living in a world of trust, we believed we were on a righteous path, that things were incrementally improving, so we did not look so hard into sunlight.

All anything ever is is another way of seeing.

I thought my husband was on my side.

I thought I knew him.

I did.

I don’t.

He changed.

I do not know how to help him.

I do not know how to reach him.

Anything is possible.

I believe in so much.

I am just that way.

I believe in love.

What matters more in this crazy world?

Shame on Casablanca’s ending! I will take the hill of beans.

(This is Garance again.)

Love. Sometimes in our lives when we feel most bereft it turns out that we are not alone at all. It is the kind of cloying Disney sentiment Lizzie might have scoffed at, but it was also the truth with her. She affected a toughness that was both real and a coping mechanism, but which also led her to downplay how sick she was. Even as she was telling me she was in remission in September, spots of cancer had already returned, I have since learned.

“The people who know us when we are not our best selves — what would we do without them? I am so grateful right now for even my mother coming through for me,” she wrote after her first surgery in December. Her mother Lynne Winters and she had a famously complicated relationship, but it was Lynne who took her home to recover both times she was released from the hospital, and who had the difficult burden of having to bring her back, and who sobbed in the sparkling clean MSKCC neuro ward hallway where other parents of too-young-to-die adult children paced forlornly.

“Jim has been the best,” Lizzie texted after the surgery. “I wish you a great first husband. That might be all you need.”

They had, in fact, not divorced. The papers were signed, but not filed. He was her husband until the end, during the final days after it was clear no further interventions would work, when she lay still in bed in what was by then her at least fifth different hospital room, for all the world the image of a big-eyed Renaissance pieta looking heavenward.

“Neurology takes a positive view toward god and prayer,” she had texted after the first surgery. “And relinquishing, which is what god and prayer is about. It is always turning your will over to a higher power and letting the will of the world and not your extraordinary manipulations lead you to your desired result. I always say that, it is my constant prayer: god, if you are out there, watch over me and your will, not mine, be done. That is what will happen anyway, but I pray for release from the dreadful fight.”

She spent her whole life fighting — fighting her parents, society, the patriarchy, social conventions, addiction, depression. But man, did she live big. She had a gift for building love into her life and at the end, her friends built a cocoon of love around her.

And on the morning of January 7, 2020, she was, as she had prayed, released.

#Elizabeth Wurtzel #i believe in love #love #garance franke-ruta #medium #writing

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ezatluba · 4 years

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The tiger next door: America’s backyard big cats

There are more tigers in American gardens than there are left in the wild. Alex Hannaford meets the owners who live cheek by jowl with their pets, and also those ensuring the big cats are treated without cruelty

Alex Hannaford

10 Nov 2019

It was the sort of headline impossible to scroll past: “Pot Smokers Find Caged Tiger in Abandoned Houston House, Weren’t Hallucinating: Police.” Last February, a group of people had snuck into a deserted house in Texas’s largest city to smoke marijuana when they stumbled upon a full-grown tiger in a cage – a cage secured by just a nylon strap and a screwdriver. Sergeant Jason Alderete of Houston Police Department’s animal cruelty unit, later told a local TV station: “It wasn’t the effects of the drugs. There was an actual tiger!” The animal was given a name, Loki, and sent to an animal sanctuary in the country, run by the Humane Society of the United States. You’d be forgiven for thinking Loki’s experience was an isolated incident – it isn’t.

An oft-quoted statistic is that there are more tigers in American back yards than there are left in the wild. According to the US Fish & Wildlife Service, there are between 3,200 and 3,500 tigers remaining in the wild globally. By some estimates there are 5,000 in captivity in the US, though there might be more. The truth is we have little idea how many there are in American ranches, unlicensed zoos, apartments, truck stops and private breeding facilities, due to a mishmash of state, federal and county laws governing their ownership.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, only 6% of America’s captive tiger population lives in zoos and facilities accredited by the Association of Zoos & Aquariums; the rest are in private hands. Some are regulated by the US Department of Agriculture and others by state laws, but some are not regulated at all. “In some states, it is easier to buy a tiger than to adopt a dog from a local animal shelter,” says the WWF.

In Texas, which lets each of its 254 counties regulate the ownership of dangerous wild animals, it’s hard to accurately gauge how many there are. In a state that prides itself on promoting individual freedoms, like openly carrying AR-15 semi-automatic rifles or bringing concealed handguns on to university campuses, it’s perhaps not surprising that owning a tiger is considered (by some) to be a God-given right.

The deplorable conditions in which Loki was found illustrate the fact that these “rights” can come at a cost. He was discovered in a 5ft x 3ft cage in the dark garage of the abandoned home. The cage’s floor was made of plywood. It was three months before police arrested his owner, a 24-year-old woman named Brittany Garza, who was taken into custody and charged with animal cruelty. She responded that she was in the process of relocating and had not abandoned the animal, as it had food and water.

Katie Jarl, the Humane Society’s southwest regional director, says there have been numerous similar incidents. In 2016, police in Conroe, a town north of Houston, received reports of a tiger roaming a residential neighbourhoodafter it escaped from someone’s back yard. “No one knew about them,” she says. “They were completely off the map.”

These animals are extremely complex and powerful and can kill a human being with a swipe of their paw

In 2009, a 330lb tiger escaped from its enclosure in Ingram, Texas, and was found in a 79-year-old woman’s back yard. In 2007, a one-year-old tiger “wearing a makeshift lead” was found shot dead in a wooded area off the motorway in Dallas. In 2003, in another Dallas suburb, a motorist spotted a four-month-old tiger roaming the side of the road. In 2001, a three-year-old boy was killed by one of his relative’s three pet tigers in Lee County, Texas. And in 2000, animal control officers near Houston spent three hours searching for a tiger that had escaped from a garden cage while its owners were out of town. That same year, in Channelview, Texas, a three-year-old boy had his arm ripped off by his uncle’s 400lb pet.

As for Loki, Jarl says a law-enforcement source of hers outside the city had got in touch to say the authorities had known about Loki’s owner for a long time. “She had been raising cubs in her home for years,” Jarl says, “in a county where there were no restrictions.”

This year, two state legislators filed bills aimed at prohibiting the private ownership of “dangerous wild animals”. But this is Texas, where the private ownership of pretty much everything is sacrosanct, and neither bill became law. There was “passionate testimony” on both sides of the debate, says the assistant to one of the legislators involved.

According to one conservation charity, four states (Alabama, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin) do not regulate the private ownership of exotic pets at all. Brittany Peet, director of Captive Animal Law Enforcement for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta), says there are a “patchwork of laws” regulating the possession of big cats. “And you can usually get around those laws by applying for a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) exhibitor’s licence,” she says. “It’s as simple as filling out an application and writing a cheque for $100. The regulations are very minimal – as long as you have a cage where the animal can fully stand up and turn around you shouldn’t have a problem getting a licence.

“Everyone should be terrified and shocked by this,” Peet adds. “These animals are extremely complex and powerful and can kill a human being with a swipe of their paw. People keeping tigers in back yards are not experts. They don’t know what they’re doing, and they’re not providing these animals with enrichment and stimulation that they need in order to live relatively normal lives in captivity.”

Bill Rathburn disagrees. He believes he provided the seven tigers that once lived on his private, 50-acre ranch 80 miles east of Dallas, with more than enough enrichment and stimulation. For more than two decades, Rathburn and his now ex-wife Lou raised the animals from cubs. For the Rathburns, the tigers were a surrogate family.

I interview Rathburn over the phone and later he sends me a photo of himself and Raja, the first tiger he and his wife bought. The pair are nose to nose inside its cage. “That was the relationship I had with him,” he says. “I’m not a reckless person and wouldn’t have gone into the cage with him if I hadn’t raised him, or knew I’d be safe doing it. He was the most loving animal from the day we got him to the day he died.”

Not everyone in the Rathburns’ neighbourhood shared their enthusiasm. “Tiger sanctuary has residents growling,” read one local headline.

Rathburn is a former deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and chief of police of the Dallas Police Department. In 1996 he was director of security for the summer Olympic Games, in Atlanta. It was while he was there that Lou bought their first tiger. Rathburn admits to feeling “kind of overwhelmed” initially, thinking about all the work and expense that would inevitably go into raising it. But when he came home he says he “immediately fell in love”.

The following year the couple bought two more tiger cubs “from a guy who had tigers in the back yard of his house in Houston”. Rathburn and his wife raised the cubs in their house. They installed a heavy mesh screen door “so they couldn’t get out of the pantry and wander round the house at night”. Outside, they constructed a cage complex. “If you saw it,” he says, “you’d realise it was a pretty good life for a tiger: a 10,000sqft play area with grass, trees and bushes, so they could run, play, hide, and chew on grass to help their digestive system.”

Raja lived to be 21. “He was unsteady on his feet towards the end,” Rathburn says. “I knew it was time to put him down. The vet came round and agreed. I was crying like a baby. It broke my heart.” Their second animal developed a tumour on her spine. When she died, Lou insisted on having her skin made into a rug. “And after we got divorced I ended up with the rug,” Rathburn says. “I have it over a chest in my bedroom, and it’s wonderful way to remember her. I talk to her once in a while.”

Eventually, he says, a neighbour complained to county officials about what they described as a growing tiger problem next door. “He got county officials upset, and two votes can sway an election in a rural area. So the county commissioners weren’t willing to extend my permit.”

I’m not a reckless person and wouldn’t have gone into the cage with him if I hadn’t raised him, or knew I’d be safe

Rathburn believes in regulation. “There should be adequate confinement areas, [and regulation] protecting animals and protecting people who might be injured by them.” But, he says, he stands by the rights of individuals to own big cats.

While this might sound incredible to someone in the UK, Rathburn’s sense of entitlement – this rugged individualism that says the government shouldn’t interfere with an individual’s right to own pretty much whatever they want – runs deep in America.

Marcus Cook has owned and worked with big cats since the early 1990s. Back then he was working for a zoo in south Texas, and when the owners retired and closed their business Cook adopted a couple of black leopards. “Anyone who says they can tame one is unrealistic,” he tells me by phone one morning from his home in Kaufman, Texas. “But they’re handleable.”

Cook says he’s owned everything “from small cats, like cougars, to lions, tigers, leopards and jaguars. The big guys.” He says his own firm, Zoocats, began as a hobby in 1995 and grew from there. He began to take the animals on the road around the US – to schools and fairs and temporary exhibits. Cook says it was all about education – “creating an entertaining wow factor” – but his critics say he was ruthlessly exploiting the animals for gain. He has been accused of numerous animal welfare violations, subjected to various complaints, and issued citations over the years.

Loki, the tiger rescued from the Houston garage, was taken to a vast ranch in Murchison, Texas, run by the Humane Society. Murchison, population 594, is a rural farming community 70 miles southeast of Dallas. The Cleveland Amory Black Beauty Ranch is situated discreetly, a few miles outside town, next to a remote country lane. You can see horses and cattle grazing in fields next to the road, but none of the exotic animals that also live here.

We feed him 8lb of food a day – humanely raised beef, turkey, large rats and rabbits

Noelle Almrud, ranch director, meets me at the main office and we climb into a truck to drive to the enclosures at the back of the ranch that house its two tigers. It’s not unlike a wildlife park, although there are no gawking tourists here and the enclosures are bigger. Loki lives in a quarter-acre fenced area, but he rotates each week from this into a three-acre enclosure next door. Both have an abundance of willows and oaks to provide shade.

As we walk towards the fence, Loki gallops over and makes a breathy snort that Almrud says is known as “chuffing” and signals affection. He rubs himself against the wire enclosure before running back to his water trough and jumping in. “He’s acclimated really well,” she tells me. “We feed him 8lb of food a day – humanely raised beef, turkey, large rats, or rabbits and supplements – six days a week, then he has a day of fasting, as he would in the wild.”

Two years ago, Almrud helped found the Big Cat Sanctuary Alliance, a network of reputable big cat sanctuaries whose mission was to strengthen the regulation of big cats in the US and get conservation facilities to work together to place rescue animals. But they face a big challenge, she explains: “Roadside zoos need shutting down, but where do you put all the animals? You couldn’t re-house all the tigers currently in roadside zoos in America. We need more money and more facilities. In a perfect world,” she says, “I’d like to be put out of business.”

Judging by the Texan appetite for big cats, that won’t be happening anytime soon.

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samiraahmeduk · 7 years

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You never forget your first time. I was 19 years old. I descended into a weird, cramped basement where student actors brought to life a weird, twisted sexual triangle. Going to student drama productions in odd spaces around the University was one of my greatest joys of those years in the late 1980s. But this one was like no other. I knew nothing about author or play. It was like being trapped in a nightmare version of a British tv culture familiar and strange from old sitcoms and Carry Ons and earnest black-and-white archive news programmes. Twenty year olds were dressed in nylon negligees and leather trousers and those weird sixties NHS specs playing a sexually frustrated older woman and man; an Adonis like something out of Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just What is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Modern, So Appealing?

Richard Hamilton (1956)

That performance of Entertaining Mister Sloane and one shortly after of What The Butler Saw sucked me in to a lifelong fascination with Joe Orton, whose plays were hugely popular among students, 20 years after his death. After graduating I would spend evenings after work listening to the audio version of Kenneth Williams’ brilliantly articulate if misleading published autobiography about Joe Orton, and reading Joe Orton’s own graphic diaries alongside them. I endlessly rewatched Stephen Frears’ film of the John Lahr biography Prick Up Your Ears, which remains one of my favourite films of all time, thanks to Alan Bennett’s delicate screenplay.

Most of all I was intrigued by the Malcolm Gladwell-10-thousand hours-esque ten years from RADA to fame. Fifty years after his appalling murder I asked to make a special Front Row for Radio 4 on Friday Aug 11th about this remarkable talent. A working class man of incredible determination and graft, who spent a decade in London reading and writing and honing his skills before fame came. Special thanks to my wonderful producer Ekene Akalawu who did such an amazing job shaping this programme and editing it.

London made John into Joe Orton, but we wanted to go back to people who knew him and to Leicester, the city that bore him.

The house on the Saffron Lane estate is gone. Joe’s sister Leonie told me she’d pleaded with the council to keep just that one house. The replacement bungalow has a tiny shabby blue plaque easy to miss and almost too high to read. As I look at it I think with frustration of the lucrative tourist industry around Paul McCartney’s National Trust owned council house in Liverpool. I wonder why the councillors of Leicester didn’t see that too?

With Leonie Orton at the Pork Pie Library, Leicester 7th Aug 2017

The Pork Pie Library (it wasn’t called that then, officially) is just round the corner. Leonie Orton, Joe’s youngest sister, who’s become his proudest and most generous champion, drove 3 hours from Norfolk, where she now lives, to talk to me. It’s a stunning art deco building which hasn’t really changed at all since Joe first started bringing her – she was 4, he was 11. She leads me to where they’d go – the children’s section. He’d read her Enid Blytons and Alice in Wonderland. She remembers how much he loved reading Shakespeare and Greek classical drama. One time they walked out and he produced a copy of Black Beauty he’d nicked and gave it to her: “Here, you can keep that.” She was too young to be able to really think about what he’d done. It’s not that anyone thinks the theft is alright. What hits me again and again is the breaktaking sense of anger and defiance of authority alongside the self-instruction that comes from every aspect of Joe Orton’s life. It’s a privilege to talk to Leonie for an hour. Sorry we couldn’t fit it all in the programme.

With Sheila Hancock

Sheila Hancock, who starred in the Broadway production and a 1968 BBC film of Entertaining Mr Sloane shared amazing stories of their friendship. Both had been born the same year, both working class and both overlapped at RADA though they didn’t know eachother as students. She fondly remembers walking with Joe around Greenwich village, pushing her pram, having Sunday lunch with her mum. Given his murder by his partner Kenneth Halliwell, she still feels regret at whether her encouragement of Joe to leave Noel Road and move on might have contributed to their arguments. Her insights into why his work has such enduring power and the impact of it in the still very deferential early 60s is hugely valuable.

John Lahr, author of Orton biography Prick Up Your Ears

John Lahr, who wrote the definitive biography Prick Up Your Ears told me he’d come to the conclusion that revenge was what motivated the greatest comedy. He felt it had motivated Orton and also his own father, the actor Bert Lahr. He also reflected on the sheer power of Orton’s eloquence; how his love of precise language is a skill that is being lost in our instant sharing age.

I also asked John about the modern accusation that his biography, framing Orton by his murder, could be seen to have unfairly defined this writer by his sexuality and his tragic death; a gay martyr. John firmly challenged that idea.

With Dr Emma Parker at New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester

Nor did we shy away from difficult questions about Joe Orton’s sex holidays exploiting teenage boys in Morocco. Both Leicester University’s Dr Emma Parker and Nikolai Foster, artistic director of Curve theatre, acknowledged how he was a working class iconoclast, who nonetheless displayed a colonial mindset as a sex tourist. Dr Parker does point out that it’s clear from his diaries that he never slept with boys under the local age of consent. And it seems important to acknowledge the importance of British criminal law in persecuting and distorting gay men’s lives.

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In the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery Dr Parker and I took a closer look at copies of some of the remarkable book covers Orton and Halliwell made and reflected on their excessive 6 month jail sentence for criminal damage. If you thought it was just tearing up books and scribbling in the margins, look again. Dr Parker also had some intriguing theory about Orton defacing only the Arden editions of Shakespeare, used by grammar schools and universities, not the cheaper Everyman editions which he owned and loved.

Nikolai Foster, Curve Artistic Director

Nikolai who directed an acclaimed Curve production of What the Butler Saw, starring Rufus Hound earlier this year, is passionate about how much Orton still speaks to modern Britain about class and deference and sexual taboos. We had a wonderful conversation about how Orton and working class talent is still held at a distance by the theatrical establishment; how much of a battle there still is for fair access and respect. Watching many of the films in the BFI archive, some of them being screened at BFI Southbank this month, it struck me that his work really comes truly alive only as theatre including the potential of TV, rather than the cinematic films which tried to open the stories up into other locations. The Bacchae-inspired TV play The Erpingham Camp, about a revolt in a holiday camp, is still remarkable viewing, and connects like an arrow to the world of Chris Morris and Black Mirror.

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Like Curve, Soft Touch Arts, a community based arts project, has done fabulous work to engage young people in Leicester in Joe Orton’s work. Jenna Forbes, who grew up on the Saffron Lane estate, like Joe, was wonderfully passionate, thoughtful and articulate about how he changed her life. At the exhibition they’ve put together there’s a boardgame based on his life. Jenna told me today how it was the most popular object on the opening night of their exhibition on Wednesday. There’s also art work by young prisoners and a copy of Generation X – the 1960s book about young people’s attitudes that Joe Orton got quoted extensively in, after lying about his age. Do visit their show, right opposite the Joe Orton exhibition co-curated by Dr Parker at the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery.

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Leonie says what really makes her angry is the thought that now, she and Joe would, should have been sharing their stories, and reminiscing. She’s 71; he would have been 84. They should be golden years. Grief must be compounded by an anger we should all feel that he was robbed of all the years he would have gone on to achieve so much more. Her terrific memoir, I Had It In Me, raises important challenges to some of the artistic licence taken in the film of Prick Up Your Ears. It reveals unpleasant truths about how the family was been treated over the years by the literary establishment of agents and lawyers as Leonie tried to take responsible ownership of his papers. I’m most shocked by the fact that the original London diary has disappeared. Only partial typescript copies survive of the original that John Lahr was able to use in his research. The last few days of entries in the days before his murder have never been found. There are theories about whether that was to protect famous names. Perhaps some or all of these papers are sitting in a lawyer’s vault. It still feels as if there’s a middle class attempt to control and limit the raw power if what Joe Orton could do with words.

My Front Row Joe Orton special produced by Ekene Akalawu is on BBC Radio 4 on Friday August 11th at 715pm and iplayer after.

Filth, fury and the funny way Britain feels about Joe Orton You never forget your first time. I was 19 years old. I descended into a weird, cramped basement where student actors brought to life a weird, twisted sexual triangle.

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janiklandre-blog · 7 years

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Monday, February 27, 2017

chilly, sunny - 9:30 a.m. in the computer room while my new computer is resting on my desk.

Going back - Saturday I wrote about my magic days in Sag Harbor - and magic they were - until - well, perhaps it is my blog that for the first time is causing me trouble. A reader - whom I left out today - is a neighbor of my friend, I too have known them for a long time, I had heard they would come on Friday and return to nyc on Sunday - I decided to stay until Sundayhoping to get a ride back into the city. The female part of the pair called Saturday morning, my friend mentioned I wanted a ride, she said I have to talk to my husband, in the evening they came for dinner, I already had heard they wanted to leave early, fine with me - I began to say I'd be happy to leave early on Sunday, he interrupted me and said: we need our privacy. I was stunned - lucklily kept my mouth closed - later wondered, might a reason be that he worried I might later write on this here blog what they talked about? In any event no reason was given, gaily they talked about local matters, I was chopped liver and after finishing what I had on my plate did say something to the effect that I was being totally ignored - my dear friend: she always wants to be the center of attention - yes I do like it if I am not totally ignored. Had I been smart I would have excused myself saying I did not feel well - he still asked are you upset because we don't want to take you with us - well - luckily I did not say much and disappeared and my friend's comment was: you arfe not b eing nice at all. I did not feel like sitting there and just listening to their happy chatter all about their affairs.

Lucklily they left soon to see some silly movie - people now have to drive to East Hampton because the movie theater in Sag Harbor has been burned down - and my friend then acknowledged that they had not been very nice to me - he could have called earlier and they could have made some excuse and saying they are sorry - instead of only saying: we need privacy. She once upon a time was part of the weathermen - now she is a vip - ready for another three weeks of travel around the world, a highly paid llecturer on feminism - they have a beautiful house in Sag Harbor, an apartment in Berlin and a large apartment on the upper west side - I assume they pay for parking for their car in the city - very expensive.

In my days with Paco he always said I attract "subhumans" - poor people, troubled peaple and my son also mentioned the troubled people I have been involved with - and continue to be involved with. I did score an M.Phil. at Columbia University - after 1968 there were thousands and thousands of Ph.D.'s in what is called "the humanities" who no longer could find work because after the student unrest - I was on the side of the rebellion - funds for humanities were drastically cut. I was altogether in the wrong department at Columbia - German - the long time chairman, already chairman in the 1930's had been a supporter of Hitler and when Bauke arrived - b0rn in the same year I was, 1932 - into a Silesian officer's family, great supporters of Hitler and his father a rocket scientist, he came in 1945 at 13 to Ohio - must have landed at Columbia when I came to Mount Holyoke - Josef Padur Bauke, probably can be googled, had long obit in the NYT after he was left to die on the sofa of Inge Halpert's x-mas party - 1984 or such - it made me believe in divine justice. He had seen to it I never would get a job - failed me in my phd orals the first time round - I had 150 letters ready to mail to colleges io a hundred mile radius of nyc - I had taught German at U.C.L.A, and also at Columbia, I am a native speaker - this was in the spring of 1969 - I had to throw those letters away, they said I had passed phd orals - and in the fall he passed me - he had failed me on the behest of the old nazi in my specialty, modern German lit - Bauke had taught the courses and when I was "a lady" - I lived at 25 East 83rd, Mount Holyoke B.A., UCLA Masters, straight A's - I was married to a Harvard Law grad, I had my hair doen on Fridays, I worke make up, nylons, heels and was elegant - my husband saw to it his wife was elegant - Bauke had given me stright A's - than he fails me in modern lit. He knew this looked absurd and on a second try int the fall of 1969 he passed me - then 69/70 I still had some part time teaching at St.Joseph's college for women in Brooklyn, next door to Pratt - my students everywhere have loved me - I was fun and I was kind - and beautiful, so they tell me - I baked the most wonderful apple cake for them and for that they remembered me

I wrote a letter to the mother superior outlining that instead of introductory German I would like to teach history of Germans in America, most of my students were taling my class because they were of German backgrround - that interested them and then they might have approached this difficult language with greater interest. German 1 the way it is taught is deadly boring for teacher and student alike - and most give up. The mother superior never acknowledged my letter and the German department was phased out - languave requirements had been very unpopular and the students in 1968 got them cancelled. Most were taught by barely paid teaching assistants as I had been - paying dues - and by the newly employed. By the summer of 1970 I had wonderful university diplomas - totally worthless for emplpoyment. I looked to high school teaching - German not an accepted subject, I t\got the necessary creds taking an exam in French, by then a year of student teaching was required, Robert G. had diverced me in the fall of 1967, harvard law grad found a way never to give me a cent again - I considered applying for welfare and write a dissertation - my topic: German women writers dealing with the awakening to what had been happening in their country - some excellent books - went to the welfare bureau, they asked, how much money do you have, I said $50, they said come back when you have no money. Also a friend at the time whose mother had been on welfare told me, never, never, never go on welfare. And - yes, there were the truly smart ones, like the once upon a time weatherman woman - who had much better connections than I had - who made it to high earners - and I - never learned how to earn money - they barely find worthwhile to look at.

I have written about how the Catholic Worker, the Catholics, have helped me - at least in theory their religion admires - well in German we call them "Bettelmoenche" -monks living by begging - which in essence the CW also does. Low income is in theory an honor - alas when it comes to practice they ask the successful to speak at their meetings - and they do have this thing about washing dishes - no machine, God forbid - and the most honorable thing to do is to wash dishes - and I certainly have washed mountains of dishes in my life, no machine ever. Still - I am saddened - that my mind has found little recognition - one does read this here blog - so far he has not made any comment to me - or, wait a minute, he has said in passing he finds it interesting.

As I said to my very dear friend in Sag Harbor - who does appreciate me despite of my short comings that she does enjoy pointing out - calling it telling me the truth - and saying - you don't want to hear the truth - oh well - I am now suffering of a strong case of Torschlusspanik - a term in soccer, where a clock ends the game - and I do hear my clock ticking and yes I would love, love love still also finding a bit of a reward in dollars and cents, money I very much would need now, or believe I would need

Anyway - at the beginning I was going to talk how people have made me aware of how people classify people - French Christine talking of people of value, she worked at the French consulate - and Joel G. talking of a lists, b lists, c lists - obviously as far as the couple is concerned who did not give me a ride I am at the very bottom of their list - but alas also of people at the Catholic Worker - who would like me to be a sweet and even tempered dish washer, always smiling, never talking - and fully admitting how good pills would be for me that would shut me up, once and for all - and most certainly not write what I just wrote now and now am going to send, unread, one again, in a hurry, Molly is about to come. Adios. Marianne

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