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Friday, July 25, 2014

Tips from Baba Wawa


A quick note before I retrieve the 15 year old from her summer dance intensive. We’re getting ever closer to 11th grade over here, and I’m experiencing trepidation. You’re shocked, aren’t you, Readers? After all, I usually face challenges with total equanimity. A veritable Dalai Lama of calma. That’s me.

For the journey, I’ve fortified myself with Barbara Walters’ first book, How to Talk to Practically Anyone About Practically Anything. I’ve decided I need a better approach to small talk – better than turning myself into a dog-and-pony show of self-deprecating neurosis. I’m thinking there might be more to conversation than that. Perhaps enquiring about the other person ostensibly listening to me? I’m not sure. I’ll have to see what Barbara says. Or said. She wrote this in 1970. Her intention was to help women – men, too, but women – because women had just recently begun moving out into more visible roles in the world. Interesting, at least to me.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Baba Wawa’s book, attributed to “Mrs. Eugene McCarthy, during a television interview I conducted with her at the time her husband was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.”

I am the way I am; I look the way I look; I am my age.  

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