Catch up for year end

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?
the play by Edward Albee

Some things I just don't get. Back in the sixties when the nuclear family ideal was being exploded, watching a frustrated husband and his lunatic wife tear each other to bits in front of a naive younger couple might be just the thing for an evening's entertainment. The shock of it all--the twisty turny of reality--the thumb in the nose to false illusions of forever marital bliss--that might have made it "the thing" to see.

I goofed by trying to read it some fifty years after it lost relevance. My mistake. Some plays are timeless; this isn't.




Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island
by Regina Calcaterra

Read in one looooong airplane trip and it shortened the trip by several hours at least. Couldn't put it down and didn't want to.

This is a first person report of the third girl in a family of four girls and one boy. They all share a common mother but she's not part of the family--she's more of the destructive force that pushes them together until they learn to rely on each other for survival, both physical and emotional. The love that the oldest girls learned in a few early years spent in the care of relatives was preserved and passed on, miraculously, to the younger children.

It's also a report of the callous indifference of social services and the foster care system. The children learned at an early age that if they told the truth about their mother's abuse, two things would happen--they would be split up, and they would be farmed out to hired caretakers--foster parents.  I know that many foster parents are wonderful people with love and intelligence to care for society's rejects. I know that some are just plain scumbags, skillful at doing and saying the right thing to keep the job but with no intention of doing the job right.  But I suspect that many more are people who need a little extra money and think that taking on an extra kid or two is no big deal. You feed and clothe them and send them to school; keep them in line with simple rules; maybe even take them to church on Sundays.  What else could the job require?

But don't let my comments put you off--this is NOT a essay on social responsibility. She just tells the facts and feelings, pulling no punches and writing no lesson plan.  It's incredibly sad and incredibly uplifting and just plain old damn! Why the hell did that have to happen?

One minor beef--she sort of dropped the brother's story after a bit, don't you think?  I wish I knew how he'd managed.