Food is an essential ingredient in Jewish life. So says my partner, Liddy, and I’m sure most agree with her. Last April, when my naturopathic nutritionist recommended I eliminate gluten, corn, soy, dairy, eggs and a number of other foods to see if we could figure out what was causing my joint pain and digestive […]
Two years ago I welcomed Elul with a sense of deep foreboding. After living with my own mortality, wrestling with continuing to make a life for myself in the midst of life-threatening illness, shifting relationships, months during which I could not eat and was kept alive with intravenous nutrition, at the High Holidays I could not reflect on my life or consider my mortality. I was still having nightmares that I was in a room full of people talking, laughing, and eating, only I couldn’t. I was pretty sure I would never fast again.
Spoiler Alert! This post is full of things that never happened, might happen, should have happened, and did happen in the Mortal Instruments books and movie.
I keep coming back to three things as I think over my experience of this play last night: All of the good things that may have happened in Rachel Calof’s life happened off-stage. When a recent Jewish college grad who doesn’t love theater and who wasn’t particularly enamored with religious school’s first comment is that he would have liked to see more exploration of the specifically Jewish experience of the Calof family it’s worth taking note. Kate Fuglei’s one-person portrayal of three fully realized, three dimensional characters is nothing short of brilliant.
Their story is about LGBTQ rights and equality. Their story is about access to health care. Their story is about family. Their story is about financial privilege. Their story is about many things. But most of all their story is about finding joy with someone and holding onto it with everything you’ve got.
26 Months Post-Bone Marrow Transplant.
“Wow, I like her,” I thought. “A lot. I would go anywhere with her.”
“Watching the movie, it didn’t immediately strike me that what I saw was a blue-eyed man with a European accent committing atrocities and plotting more and claiming genetic superiority.”
“They believed me fixable. I knew I wasn’t broken.”
Two years ago today Amy Ariel got a bone marrow transplant that saved her life. She doesn’t know anything about the donor except that he’s in another country, around 34 years old, and probably has a mother.