Motley Moose – Archive

Please sign up to become an organ donor, if you haven’t already done so.

Last night, my mom’s life was vastly improved because someone made that decision.  That means she has the new kidney she’s been waiting for a life free from dialysis.  And that all happened because some decided it would be a good thing that G-d forbid anything happened to them their organs could be used to save and improve lives.  Taking those five minutes can really make a difference and do a whole world of good for many people.

I’m very happy to report that she’s doing well at the moment.  The kidney is starting to come to life and she is doing really well for someone that came out of major surgery around two o’clock this morning.

So, have a happy and healthy new year and please, please, please, make the decision to become an organ donor (if you haven’t already done so).  

Utah is one of the remaining states still “undecided” about Medicaid Expansion.  Utahns For Medicaid Expansion,  chaired by a doctor in private practice (Ray Ward) has taken on the task of organizing us to support Medicaid Expansion despite our do-as-little-as-possible governor and totally useless legislature.  

It’s been five years since I graduated from law school (June 2008) and eight years since I graduated from college (June 2005).  Now, after five years out of the classroom, and holding some temp jobs here and there a few years back, I’m finally heading back to school to do something that I considered back when I was still in undergrad.

Way back in 2005 I considered staying in college an extra year so that I could graduate with double major of History and Accounting.  The idea was that I would become both an attorney and a CPA.  Instead, I ultimately decided to head to straight to law school and graduated pretty much right in the heart of the Great Recession.

After that I found some temp jobs once I was admitted to the bar, but a little more than a year after that my mom’s health declined to the point that it was best for me to stay home and take care of her.  Since she’s been a single parent since I was three, I’m an only child and the rest of our family doesn’t live nearby everything fell on me.  I’m not sorry or resentful about that happening.  Family is family.  That’s my view.

Thankfully, now, her health is good enough that she can pretty much care for herself at home.  In fact, she’s now healthy enough that I can go away to visit family for a few days.  That said, it’ll be even better once she finally gets her kidney transplant.

Anyway, back to the main subject below the squiggly.

From my personal archives. I’m in the mood to share something today. 🙂

Washington and Lee is a fine old American university. At least that’s what I hear; I never studied there. My own (liberal) education began under quite different tutelage: that of Lawrence and Lee.

Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee were one of the great playwright partnerships of the American theatre, probably best known for Inherit The Wind (1955) — to this day one of the most-produced plays in America — which, along with other classic works from the ’50s like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, was part of the nation’s arts community’s rejection of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his odious -ism.

The team went on to write The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail (1970), their response to the Vietnam war (they were against it) and First Monday in October (1978), a play about the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, which adumbrated Sandra Day O’Connor by three years (and which explored the ideological divide between liberal and conservative Justices).

By the time I got to know any of these works, however, I was already under the spell of another of Lawrence and Lee’s creations.

Or, more correctly, adaptations. Her name was Mrs. Burnside; and if Lawrence and Lee served as my first institution of higher learning, she was unquestionably the dean, the doyenne (a word, by the way — and this is no mere coincidence — that I first encountered in connection with Molly Picon, who I had read was “the doyenne of the American Yiddish theatre”).

The world knows her better as Auntie Mame.

In the first decades of the 17th century the Dutch went mad for tulips. At the height of the craze in the 1630s, tremendous sums were given, fortunes were gained and lost – for a flower with no scent, no commercial application such as dye, or perfume, or medicine; a flower that bloomed for only a few days a year.

The most highly-prized tulips were those which, through some fluke, displayed variegated colors in flame-like striations; one of the most spectacular of these varieties was known as the Semper Augustus, a stunning blossom of deep carmine flames on a pure white ground.

These extraordinary flowers were called by the Dutch ‘broken.’