Marlene Wagman-Geller

“I figure when my husband comes home at night, if those kids are still alive, hey, I’ve done my job.” Roseanne Barr

     Baby boomers whiled away untold hours watching television that beamed airbrushed portrayals of mothers such as ever so sweet Marion Cunningham. These Stepfordian housewives vacuumed while wearing heels, wore dresses replete with accessories, every hair in place. When their children arrived home, they indulged in home baked cookies, while their model moms listened to the recital of their days as if it were the Sermon on the Mount. Enter Roseanne.

He was my cream, and I was his coffee-And when you poured us together, it was something.”

        Balancing a fruit hat, one inspired by the “baianas,” Afro-Brazilian vendors, dancer Carmen Miranda’s samba sashayed onto the world stage. Fruit must be titillating, as another entertainer, clad in a banana skirt, likewise unleashed shock waves around the globe.

“I’m saving the bass player for Omaha.”

   “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose....” The song lyric, the paean to anguish, serves as the existential cry of Janis Joplin, the poster child for angst. The singer blazed across the sky: a comet whose brightness illuminated the darkness before disappearing into the night.

In the 1960s, Diana Ross, sheathed in sequined splendor, belted out hits for Motown’s The Supremes. A half a century later there appeared another supreme-one dressed in black with distinctive collar-who dissented in D. C.

And no birds sing.” This was the closing line of the British poet, John Keats,’ 19^th century

poem, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” The reason for the silence of the skies was nature’s

empathy for a knight, victim of a femme fatale. In post-war America, the skies were also

ominously quiet-for a far different reason.

“You cannot defeat us ever. The tyrant will be brought down.”

     In his seventeenth-century home in Delft, Holland, Johan van der Meer captured on canvass scenes of domestic tranquility: Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, The Guitar Player, Girl with a Pearl Earring. While immortal works of art end up adorning the walls of palaces, mansions, and museums, van der Meer’s masterpieces spent time in a trunk of a car and an Irish cemetery due to a rebel with a religious-like passion.