Lifted, By My Girls! — The Archives — Formerly Vented Uplift

  One of my favorite quotes comes from a simple children’s book. In Dr. Suess’ “The Lorax,” he says, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” This quote runs in my head as a constant life theme. I have a bit of a “save the world” complex, but as my students love to remind me, “Miss, the world is broken. There’s nothing we can do.” YIKES! That sounds pretty despairing.  Then I go back to  The Lorax  quote; if we all felt the world was beyond saving, it would be. Minor changes, little effort, and even the smallest steps are still going in the right direction. So, I am here to tell you how one average lady from Brooklyn is attempting to save the world.  In 2011 I had an idea to start a social fundraising initiative called  The Hero’s Benefit,  or THB as I so lovingly refer to it.  THB  was meant to be a response to the Extortion 17 crash, which killed 31 American Service Members and left 32 chi...

This is what I want you to do: tell someone you love them, and dinner's at six. That's the tagline from one of my favorite memoirs on food and entertaining, Bread and Wine, by Shauna Neiquist and this, I believe, is where the good stuff is found. In 2011, I went to visit my grandma in California for the last time. Each morning I’d drive to the hospital, and then each afternoon, I’d walk back out into the parking lot—the one with the little rose garden--and all I ever wanted to do after a day spent there, with its beeping machines gray hospital beds, and smells of plastic, was to gather friends around a big table and pass heaping bowls of food. To eat and drink and laugh into the fading evening light and celebrate—well, nothing more than simply being alive. In fact, it’s the first thing I did when I got home. A call went out to friends, and just like that we were on my deck back in Colorado, filling glasses of wine and eating grilled salmon with lemons and arugula and parmesan s...