Gabon

The WOW Factor: Words of Wisdom from Wise Older Women Martha is a Marvel Bonnie Lee Black (Gabon 1996-98) May 22, 2023 Martha Stewart is a marvel, don’t you agree? She’s a quintessential American success story, and Americans love success stories more than any other kind. From her modest beginnings as the second of six children in a working-class Polish-Catholic family in Nutley, New Jersey, Martha has risen to great heights, succeeding on every rung of her personal ladder, and climbing back up when she’s fallen off. She’s been a fashion model, a Wall Street stockbroker, an entrepreneur par excellence known worldwide as “the empress of domesticity,” a prison inmate, and now, at age eight-one no less featured in a bathing suit on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s just-published swimsuit issue. It takes your breath away. When I was a caterer in Manhattan from ’86 to ‘96, Martha was the caterer other . . .

  by Bonnie Lee Black (Gabon 1996-98) • There’s a joke (una broma) that Mexicans in other parts of Mexico tell among themselves, I learned this week, that goes something like this: If you want to visit San Miguel de Allende, you’ll need to get a U.S. visa. In other words, Mexicans themselves don’t think of SMA as being in Mexico, it’s so overrun with us Norteamericano gringos. This broma, like most jokes, contains a large grain of truth. In the eight years I’ve lived here, I’ve often heard SMA being referred to as “Mexico Lite” and “Gringolandia.” In fact, in 2010 the director Dennis Lanson made a video titled “Gringolandia” about this very fact. According to the most recent estimates, we expats represent only about 10 percent of the residents of San Miguel, but our presence seems to me to be outsized. We gringos are everywhere, all the time – in all . . .

  Ballet Orphans: A Prequel (Ballet Theatre Chronicles: Book 3) by Terez Mertes Rose (Gabon 1985-87) Classical Girl Press January 2021 375 pages $12.99 (Paperback), $2.99 (Kindle)   Terez writes: I am the author of Off Balance and Outside the Limelight ( 2015, 2016), A Dancer’s Guide to Africa (2018) and Ballet Orphans (Jan 2021). A former Peace Corps volunteer and ballet dancer, my writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Crab Orchard Review, Women Who Eat (Seal Press), A Woman’s Europe (Travelers’ Tales), Literary Mama, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Jose Mercury News.  I review ballet performances for Bachtrack.com and blog about ballet and classical music at The Classical Girl. I make my home in the Santa Cruz Mountains with my husband and son. I love humor, hiking, an engrossing book, and a nice glass of red.”