Old So What

  Maybe I’m taking a proprietary view here in that this successful series, which ran on HBO, from June 1998 to February 2004, should remain part of its time, without an appearance in 2021. Talk about a fish out of water! This is not good. Leave Sex and the City alone.   You have tortured and abused the original enough. It was in, its time, for the viewers of that time, a very enjoyable show. As one of those viewers, now I can no longer look at it. It has been distorted beyond all meaning...beyond all redemption. What are you trying to achieve here? I think what you have created is an unrecognizable Frankenstein.   And an unlikeable one at that.  

  An Internet personality for our times. Cash is in real estate:   leasing apartments in New York City.   He likes some questionable properties if you ask me, but maybe it’s because he is the most optimistic person on the planet. Not that there is anything wrong with that. He also dissects the neighborhoods that the properties are in. He speaks of relevant issues such as:   the safety of the location, available transportation, and local places he can personally recommend. Cash also takes trips outside the boroughs of New York.   He takes his wife (Japanese born) and his two very sweet children to Japan occasionally.   Whether this is business or pleasure I don’t know, maybe a little of both. Wherever he goes for his videos, people seem to know and like him.   Why not?   Cash is a likeable guy, and sometimes his comments are really funny, but his thoughts are always original.

  Zsa Zsa Gabor If you don’t know who she was then why are you reading this blog? Ms. Gabor was an actress and celebrity, known for her many marriages, approximately nine (though I don’t think she counted one as an actual marriage), and her many humorous, inciteful quips. (I used to see her in New York City when I lived there as a child/adolescent.   My family and I seemed to run into her often right outside the entrance to Saks Fifth Avenue. Not that we knew her, we did not, but after every encounter my mother would embarrass us, her children, by doing her imitation of Zsa Zsa ad nauseum.) Zsa Zsa was an actress, mostly known for her style, beauty, sense of self-deprecating humor, inside stories about fellow celebrities, wealth and most of all her vulnerability. That last characteristic was what people liked most about her. We felt as if we knew her, personally.

  It was not lost on me that I chose to start to write in earnest after my relatives, who were writers, were either in mental decline or dead. I obviously didn’t want any comparisons to turn up. There was one person about whom the following story revolved. About whom my entire world revolved at the time. It was my mother, of course. This particular story began on the morning of The Interview, an ordinary enough occasion for young girls in the 1950s who wished to enter Polite Society. As defined by people who considered themselves to be socially superior, thus allowing them to set standards of behavior for everyone else. I was 14 at the time, just slightly pretty, and exhibiting a beginning glimpse of attractiveness to come. We were late as usual. (I’m certain that when she was dying, my mother told God, “WAIT, I’m not ready yet!”) I never actually called her Mother, but rather, “Mommie” until like a slap across the face, she told me that I was too old to be calling...