We Are All Connected

A writer, a poet, Alma Mahler and me (or six degrees of just about everybody)

Alice Dunbar Nelson was a poet, a diarist, and activist. She lived in Delaware, which was where Mary Ann Shadd Carey, who was a journalist, an attorney and abolitionist was born. While their dates are separated by two generations, if they’re at a cocktail party somewhere in the after life, you can be sure, they’ll find something in common.

Alma Mahler was a composer, a writer, possibly a genius and certainly a muse. In 1941, she fled Europe with her third husband, to the United States. However, years before that, her first husband, Gustav Mahler, worked with Enrico Caruso. Caruso was married to a woman whose sister lived at the house below on 9th street, which is only blocks from my home in New Jersey.

The house where Enrico Caruso’s sister-in-law lived…

Many years later, the house was owned by a guy who sold me his dining room table. This was a few years ago, almost sixty years after Alma Mahler died in New York City, next door to the building where Gloria Steinem has lived since 1966. Gloria gave my brother, who is older than sixty years old, his very first record player. All of us everywhere, are somehow connected.

The street where Alma died and Gloria lives

Of all the folks described above, only Mary Ann Shadd is mentioned in this week’s podcast. But my point is, that while we are often pigeonholed and categorized, categorization often conveys only a part of truth, because the thing you might be noted for, is not necessarily relevant to one’s audience.

All of us, whether we’re readers, viewers or simply bystanders, need a feeling of connection for something to sustain our interest.

It’s both complicated and simple.

Last night I attended a publication party for the brilliant Kim Taylor Blakemore’s latest offering, The Good Time Girls Get Famous.

Previously, Kim has written extraordinary historical thrillers wherein the protagonists are so isolated and unable to connect, that the reader is swept into narratives wherein one literally holds one’s breath. The Good Time Girls, however, are not like that at all. They are whimsical, absurd and deliciously funny, which is because, gentle reader, The Good Time Girls have each other.

What is currently going on around us and the horrors of the last month - from Maine to the Middle East - are dreadful reminders that too many of History’s shameful, tragic lessons (be it the Holocaust or Rwanda or Darfur, Vegas or Uvalde, or Sandy Hook) remain unlearnt.

Still, despite mankind’s shocking propensity for violence, I do believe we are connected and we need to come together.

We need community and we need each other. To that end, I bring you Angry Dead Women: Episode 3, About Community.