Betsy Robinson's Blog

I'm writing columns on Substack.

https://betsyrobinson.substack.com/

Subscribe (free) to get a potpourri of political, funny, and personal stories (nonfiction and occasional fiction) as well as book reviews. I’m interested in material that helps me and everybody grow and become more self-aware. And I’m always hungry to laugh.

I'm 74 and all my life I've been a late bloomer.

When I was an actor in my twenties, a roommate advised me to do my own thing since I was already writing my own audition monologues. It was the time when performance art was exploding in downtown Manhattan. Singers were singing, actors like Whoopie Goldberg were creating their own material: finding a way to work when there was no work.

But I wanted to jump through commercial hoops. After 10+ years of leaping, my final swan song was writing and performing a one-woman (me) play called Darleen Dances to much acclaim for two workshop audiences and subsequently having the opening monologue published in a popular actors' monologue book and being performed so often that it's on a "do not do" list for university auditions. But no commercial production or work of any paying kind followed, so I got off the dead-end show-biz road.

For years I've worked as a journalist and editor while I've written novels. Some have won awards and been published by small presses. But the last two were languishing, unread despite a good-hearted agent's submissions.

Why?

Because I'm not famous, I don't have a big sales record on Bookscan, and … Who know? I don't really care.

But as the 2024 election approached, my whole being went into alarm with thoughts of "Time's up!" My psychic voice was screaming that no matter how big Kamala's crowds, a blood bath was encroaching. And I had something to say about dealing with it in the second of my two languishing novels, The Spectators.

So I started Kano Press and published it two months before the debacle erupted.

What did I want to say so badly?

The Spectators is a novel about our herd nature and dealing with it as a person who prefers to think independently and observe. And my epiphany when I got to the end of my story was that it is not an option to divorce the herd. We can tell ourselves we are independent, but that is a lie. As goes the herd, no matter how we resist, we will go as well.

And since you cannot control anybody else in the herd, all you can do is try to find an inner truth and live by it. Doing that is by no means a passive action—witness Cory Booker's marathon. But acting with an impermeable sense of truth is like Zen Master fighting. You do battle in a relaxed, energized state, knowing exactly who you are and why you are playing your part.

Part love letter to NYC’s Upper West Side, part an ode to friendship between a writer and her creations (reluctant psychic protagonist Lily Hogue and her loner friends, with guest appearances of real and fictional historical events and people, from Bernie Madoff to Paul Simon to terrorists), The Spectators’ cast of characters battles the problems of foreknowing disasters we cannot control and being part of an uncontrollable human herd.

Discount ($10 in the USA only) paperbacks here: https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?jp...

E-books are sold everywhere you can buy books (even on Bookshop.org).

And here’s a short reading:
https://youtu.be/4GOZTPxQ6H8

On walkers and canes they shuffled, in wheelchairs pushed by their children and grandchildren they rode, flanking a multitude of Boomers who'd made a lifestyle of youth and piloted the protesters on motorized scooters. "People get ready . . ." sang the young people who had used their smart phones to organize the buses and convoys. From all over the country they flooded the streets of DC, finally so tightly packed against the reinforced spear-topped White House fences that the old people crashed through.

But neither broken hips nor the Orange Man brigades could quell the swell of outraged pensioners at a missed payment of their hard-earned Social Security.

They hobbled, they limped, they slow-motion surged from the Ellipse onto the White House lawn and into the Kennedy Rose Garden which no longer had flowers since the woman the Orange Man doesn't sleep with replaced them with concrete. They filled the East Lawn, the West Lawn, and the South Lawn, where several elderly women were heard to exclaim, "I found a rotten Easter egg."

"I don't suppose we could eat them," replied another, miffed at the cost of her breakfast since the inauguration.

David Hogg, the new vice chair of the Democratic National Committee and former Parkland School gun control activist, rolled his meemaw to the quickly erected podium and lowered the microphone to her chin.

"I have one thing to say," she bellowed over the electronic squeal.

"All right, all right there, young lady," came a gruff but hopeful voice over an invisible sound system.

"Bernie Sanders!" laughed David Hogg's meemaw. "Take it away, Bernie!"

And as David carefully rolled his grandmother down the portable ramp that had been hastily but expertly invented for quick assembly by a gaggle of MIT students who understood the future and wanted to do their part, Bernie took the stage.

"Welcome! Welcome to everyone! We are the richest country in the world. You have all worked hard for your retirement income! And finally, finally, it seems we have an issue that brings us all together.

"Just for a moment here, let's hear from you. Tell us where you came from, and if you don't mind, your political affiliation.

"You there, yes you in the lovely blue muumuu with the nice pageboy hairdo—reminds me of my mom in Brooklyn, always did her hair nice. Yes, tell us, where are you from and anything else you care to share."

"My name's Estelle. I'm from Michigan, and I voted for Trump—"

As the boos erupted, Bernie raised his hands like Moses. "Everybody, everybody is welcome here. Excuse me, excuse me one moment, Estelle, I think we need to establish our commonality." And instantly a respectful calm was restored.

"It is a big country," continued Bernie, "and people come with all different issues. But here and now—this is a place to come together for our common good, so there will be no booing." And as a mumble of apology undulated through the crowd, "All right, Estelle, go on. Tell us what brought you."

"I was a librarian for 50 years—"

"Wonderful, wonderful," mumbled Bernie. "Never mess with librarians. Go on, Estelle."

"I'm ashamed of my vote. You'd think I'd have realized—"

All around her, old people cooed and comforted with several on either side of her caressing her arms.

"Thank you, thank you," whimpered Estelle, her limpid blue eyes filling with tears behind her thick lenses. "I never made a lot of money, but I never spent a lot either. I was smart, so I thought with my Social Security I'd be all right. But now— Now—" Unable to go on, she collapsed in tears.

"All right, all right, we understand, Estelle. We're so glad you're here. Who's next?"

A tall bald Black man way in the back raised his hand, and Bernie shouted for him to speak.

"I'm from Tennessee and I only voted for Trump because of RFK, Jr., but now I realize that a guy with an oil and gas family trust fund don't know nothing about living on Social Security. I heard he mixed it up with anti-social obscurity due to malnutrition and food deserts."

"Yes! Yes!" bellowed the crowd.

"Next," said Bernie, pointing. "You there in the wheelchair with the oxygen tank. Can we get some help here? Somebody hand her a microphone."

"Thank you, thank you," gasped the woman. "I appreciate— I've got COPD—"

"Take your time, take your time, dear," comforted Bernie. "We're here for the long haul. Give her some space, people."

The woman coughed, cleared her throat, and then spoke in a voice that belied her medical appliances: "My name is Maria. I'm a Mexican American, a citizen of this country for 60 years, and I'm living in a nursing home in Southern California—"

"Bless you," mumbled Bernie.

"Bless you, bless you," echoed the crowd.

"I thought the wildfires would do me in, but thank God they didn't touch us."

"Thank God," said Bernie.

"Thank God, thank God," echoed the crowd.

"I'm so glad you made it," said Bernie soberly. "What brings you here today, Maria?"

"Well, this may sound silly—"

"Nothing is silly," said Bernie. "Take your time. Tell us."

"Well, I was brought up to believe the Golden Rule. All my life I tried to do the right thing. I paid my taxes, helped my neighbors, and volunteered at my children's school. Two of them served in the military and died in Iraq."

"I'm so sorry," said Bernie. "Thank you for their service."

"Thank you, thank you," echoed the crowd.

"And the other one, well he died of AIDS in 1982."

"Aw, gee," said Bernie, wiping his brow and shaking his head with sorrow, and a wave of sympathy rolled through the assembly.

"I was about as mad as a mother can be at Reagan for never even mentioning the crisis. But at least he didn't try to make it worse.

"But this—" she gestured toward the White House, "This is much worse. I'm a Christian, and like I said, I believe in the Golden Rule, but also there's the 'eye for an eye,' which the Orange Man said is his favorite Bible passage. So I think it's time we did unto this regime as they have done unto us."

A murmur of confused delight began to reverberate across the White House lawn, spreading quickly back to Pennsylvania Avenue, then to 17th and 15th Streets on the west and east and as far as H Street and Constitution Avenue on the north and south as Maria's voice resounded through the sound system.

"What are you saying, Maria?" queried Bernie, a slight smile twitching at the corners of his mouth.

"Shut them down!" boomed Maria in a voice that came from a place beyond her oxygen-deprived lungs. "No tax payments, no food deliveries, I call on all White House service personnel to walk out now! No cleaning people, no butlers, no maids. Walk out! Walk out!"

And miraculously, an explosion of uniformed workers—cooks in aprons, chauffeurs in hats, doormen, even many office workers in business clothes—hearing Maria's cry, exploded out of the White House.

"No traffic, no commerce, no communication! Many of us are already sitting, so we don't even have to move."

"You mean …?" said Bernie, now with a full-face grin.

"Yes!" declared Maria. "A sit-in. Nobody move for as long as it takes. My grandson, Jesus, brought me here, and he and his friends from colleges around the country brought tents and supplies—"

And as if ascending out of an ocean, battalions of young men and women rose with backpacks and duffle bags bursting with food, medications, books and magazines, and even solar-powered appliances for cooking, entertainment, and medical sterilization.

And as the 70 million pensioners and their supporters heaved themselves to the ground, at a window somewhere in the White House private residence, a big bloated blob of a man with tiny hands and a decompensating brain, peeked out the window and muttered, "Wow, what a crowd size. They love me. They really really love me."

ALERT: TRUMP CENSORS NEARLY 200 TERMS FROM OFFICIAL PLATFORMS

A Facebook post reported:

The New York Times published a list of about 200 terms that the Trump administration reportedly prohibits or avoids. The list includes words such as activists, anti-racism, belonging, breastfeeding, climate crisis, community diversity, disability, discrimination, equality, feminism, gender, immigrants, LGBT, mental health, minorities, oppression, orientation, pregnant, racial justice, racism, sex, transgender, and victims.

The NYT stressed that the published list is likely incomplete, as more internal memos exist than those obtained by the newspaper.

(For a complete list that is free to read, see Diane Ravitch's blog)

A couple of commenters thought that no matter what MAGA censors, they can't change reality, and therefore this word ban was "bonkers, stupid, and ineffective."

My response:

The ban is neither bonkers nor stupid. It is a very effective way to control what we, the people, believe. The censorship is calculated carefully to accomplish a whitewashing of communication and therefore people's mindsets. This is what dictatorships do. This is what the Nazis did. This is an endeavor that is tried and proven effective.

In the 1940s, my mother was one of the first female copywriters in a NYC advertising firm, and she used to say if you can get people to believe advertising, you can control what they think.

Not taking this stuff seriously and not understanding its effectiveness is how Democrats have been repeatedly defeated. We have a kind of arrogance that is self-sabotaging: we like to believe we think independently and therefore cannot be controlled by the language around us. But this simply is not true.

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff’s book The All New Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004) became wildly popular during the rise of Trump, helping warring families bridge political gaps by teaching them how to reframe their thoughts and find common values. Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack in Israel, as anti-Semitic speech exploded, Lakoff wrote on Facebook:

“All thought is carried out by neural circuitry—it does not float in air. Language neurally activates thought. Language can thus change brains, both for the better and the worse. Hate speech changes the brains of those hated for the worse. It creates toxic stress, fear and distrust—all physical, all in one’s neural circuitry active every day.

“This internal harm can be even more severe than an attack with a fist. It imposes on the freedom to think and therefore to act free of fear, threats, and distrust.

"It imposes on one’s ability to think and act like a fully free citizen for a long time.

“Hate speech can also change the brains of those with mild prejudice, moving it towards hate and threatening action. When hate is physically in your brain, then you think hate and feel hate, you are moved to act to carry out what you physically, in your neural system, think and feel.

“That is why hate speech in not ‘mere’ speech.”

And so it follows, if you ban, for lack of a better term, "inclusive speech"—speech that invites thoughts of equity, acceptance, and empathy—you will gradually transform the culture to be accepting of a dictatorship.

This stuff is serious. Wake Up!

From The Spectators (Kano Press, Nov. 2024), a love-letter to the Upper West Side of NYC, friendship, and how to survive our current debacle.

"It is hard to avoid our herd’s proclivity for misery porn—an exaggeration, an addiction, a distraction like any other—and still stay informed. Leslie and I moan only to one another about the latest events in the fast-moving devastation known as the forty-fifth President of the United States, and, in an effort to become spectators who also act, we have become demonstration buddies—marching, carrying signs, and relentlessly calling our representatives to express our outrage, while abstaining from adding to the heat with social media venting."

Discount ($10) paperbacks in USA available at:
IngramSpark
Internationally available wherever you buy books.

ebooks sales that benefit your local indie bookshops
Bookshop.org

Forty-four minutes past midnight on February 7, 1951, I came into the world at the now-nonexistent Woman's Hospital, 39 blocks north of where I live in Manhattan.

When I was very young, my mother told me I was a mistake, quickly followed by the explanation that they'd have had me eventually, just not when I made my appearance. Even then I knew that "at another time" would not have been me. But oddly, I was not hurt by this. It was information that is even more important to me now than it was then.

Abortion, which I firmly support, was not an option and even though my sudden presence caused problems ("Good Trouble?"), I'm glad I made it through. And I'm absolutely positive that by the end of her life, my mother, who became my best friend for her last 10 years, felt the same.

Today I am 74. Way older than my father when he exited; six years older than my mother when she lifted off; and way way older than I thought I'd ever be.* And I'm grateful to be here, doing this life, trying my best to finish what I started so many lifetimes ago.

I may fail. As I said, my timing has never been great. But I'll go down acting and meditating … for the well-being and transformation of me, my ancestors, and for all who populate this precious world we all share.
__________________

* Because it is my birthday, I'm giving you a present if you are a person (like I was and sometimes still am) who is afraid of your own thoughts because of the edict that "Thoughts create reality."

If my thoughts created reality, I would be dead.

Thoughts create your experience of reality, but it is thoughts married to actions + fate/luck/karma that create what happens in this land of karma and matter.**

If you merely think and never act, you will have a passive existence. You can be born into wealth and experience life as drudgery. You can meditate your behind off, but not affect the karmic chaos in which we are all, by default, participants.

If you think you are hopeless and not worthy of life, and you eat/drink/drug/etc. yourself to death, you have acted on your thoughts and it is your actions that have proven the validity of your thoughts. This is called "confirmation bias."

If you have lousy thoughts like I had growing up and still do, but you DO NOT ACT on them—e.g., you don't kill yourself but instead live as healthily as you can; you do not seek revenge due to spiraling hurt and rage after somebody does you wrong, but instead you just feel and process the feelings; and if, no matter how ineffective you believe you are, when you see a destructive raging fire, you attempt to extinguish it—you essentially starve into transformation the beliefs behind the thoughts.

What's key is discernment which requires knowing WHAT you think and then choosing to act or not act on it. In fact, the whole business of condemning and being ashamed of our own thoughts lies wholly in the ego.

Lift up! Expand! Send your roots deep down to the core of Mother Earth. BE here. Discernment is only possible from a whole and therefore higher Self. And when the Self identifies an ego problem, then the ego gets embarrassed, and transformation happens. And as you transform, you have the potential for great joy and, eventually, amusement at your own lousy thoughts. So quit being afraid of your thoughts!

_______________

**Many of us have heard stories about enlightened beings manifesting stuff—food for the hungry, etc. By definition, enlightened beings live at One with everything (as opposed to split and in their ego), which means their steady vibration is quite different from that of most people. Their vibration is One with the Creator/the act of Creation/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. Hence, their actions are those of the Creator. Hence, manifestation.

Unless you are an enlightened being, to worry about manifesting stuff by merely thinking about it, or to believe you can magically heal the world by doing nothing is, to put it bluntly, the magical thinking of a young ego.

Whatever your tradition is, think of a Great Being whose counsel you believe in. All Great Beings encouraged action.

1. Today, Jan. 7th, is the relaunch of a second edition of my funny novel The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg, revised and republished when it went out of print.

The Humorous Story of a One-Woman Train Wreck—Winner of Black Lawrence Press's Big Moose Prize

Meet Zelda McFigg. She is 4-feet 11-inches tall, 237 pounds, and convinced that she could be somebody, if only someone would recognize her inner beauty and star quality. Cousin to Ignatius J. Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces) and Homer Simpson, Zelda runs away from home at age 14, and at age 49 ¼ writes this furiously funny memoir to "set the record straight" about her lifetime of indiscretions. (Video: https://youtu.be/baVdveWdtao)

paperback
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DQS8DXJ8
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-last...

Bookshop.org ebook
ebook

kindle
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Will-Test...

kobo
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-...

Nook
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-...


2. I am thrilled to have my essay "Whole-Body Reading" in the winter issue #018 of Oh Reader magazine. It's about my visceral experience reading and why it's visceral—why some books work on a body level and some don't. It's a piece I've wanted to write for a long time, including an explanation of what I qualify as a story that "had to be written"—the books that send my body into movement and noise.

You can get the winter issue, #018 at Barnes & Noble stores magazine sections. And hopefully it will be available soon on www.OhReader.com.

Happy New Year,
Betsy

SALE: NOVEMBER 25 – DECEMBER 2ND
This Cyber Week, two paperback books are on sale in USA:



CATS ON A POLE
A novel (with humor and an edge) about curmudgeon Harmony Rogers and healing teacher Joshua Gardner, and their duel of psychic wills.
Discount ($9+shipping) link:
https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?KD...



THE SPECTATORS
Part love letter to NYC’s Upper West Side, part an ode to friendship between a writer and her creations (reluctant psychic protagonist Lily Hogue and her loner friends, with guest appearances of real and fictional historical events and people, from Bernie Madoff to Paul Simon to terrorists), The Spectators' cast of characters battles the problems of foreknowing disasters we cannot control and being part of an uncontrollable human herd.
Discount ($9+shipping) link: https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?jp...

The Spectators began with a question: How can I be as a member of a diverse, chaotic herd that I cannot control? I am a member of the human herd whether I like or agree with that or not. And the question has become more urgent as the political and cultural chaos escalates and we seem to be careening toward self-destruction.

Here's a secret that I discovered by writing it: what I was really writing was a quest for the Self. People who meditate will understand that. I hope some non-meditators will understand as well.

Here is an excerpt where I more or less say it:

The whole truth is that I need my spectator friends as much as they need me. I claim to have written them, so I must contain them, but this is not exactly true. They contain me as much as I do them. And who contains all of us? Who or what writes me writing them? What etheric umbilical cord conveys all that is? A birthing is happening, but who is birthing what? These are questions that drive me crazy, and the only people who would even listen to me talk about this without directing me post-haste to a therapist or an ashram are other spectators. We are a tribe

Amazon is finally selling both the Kindle and the paperback, but here's a discount link for paperbacks in the USA: IngramSpark

“The Spectators” [excerpt]

At lunchtime, Lily bids adieu to the PR office walls and walks across the street to the museum. As she shows her ID to the guard, she starts to explain, but he clearly is not in the mood and he waves her through, along with other refugees from the PR building. On entering the museum, all five go in different directions. Temps, thinks Lily. We’re all lost and temporary. And with almost no interest in them or anything, she wanders from the entrance to room after room full of priceless art. She senses there is something she is here to see, but she has no idea what and has only forty-five minutes to find it. She can’t remember last night’s dream, but there was something . . . something . . . And there it is. She is the only one in the gallery. She zigzags almost dreamily, as if pulled to the Chagall. She’s like a large metal body in water being sucked by a giant magnet to the other side of the room pool, to stand in front of a painting called “The Birthday.”

First it’s the warmth of the red carpet, the blues and green of the tapestries, the rich orange of the bedspread that draw her. See the pattern, she remembers. Center are two figures—a woman with a bouquet, in a black dress with a frilly white collar, being pulled, just as Lily is right now, but she’s headed toward a window, and floating next to her, but above, is an armless man, a lover, his neck craned backward and twisted in an impossible position to catch her in a kiss. They float back to back, these impossible lovers, but in perfect harmony. See the shape of the sliver of white wall that shows between their bodies. It’s almost a body itself, cutting off what would be a corner of the tapestry on the back wall as if it, too, is an entity. What is it about this painting? Lily is feeling faint and realizes she has stopped breathing. She draws in air and as she does, she could swear she sees the lovers move. The movement makes them inevitable. Back to back, but face to face, eye to eye, nose to nose, and mouth on mouth, they see each other, and they know they are not alone.

It is the most comforting picture Lily has ever seen, and she realizes she has been in a trance for forty-five minutes when her stomach growls and the noises of the public entering the museum shock her out of her reverie.
# # #

This piece is excerpted from The Spectators published in September 2024. Available as paperback and e-book everywhere, but discount paperbacks in USA available here:
IngramSpark
Here is the Chagall painting described in the excerpt, and here is artist Susan A. Pascale's riff on it for the cover.