New! General Adoption Support Group Interested in learning about the life-long experiences of adoption? Join Ohio Birthparent Group and Adoption Network Cleveland for a new adoption support group forming in Central Ohio! FIRST MEETING: Sunday January 22nd, 2012 / 2-4pm Gahanna Public Library Community Room310 Granville St. Columbus, OH 43230 Designed to create open dialogue across the spectrum of experiences with adoption, this support group is open to anyone who is touched by adoption or simply interested in learning more about adoption issues. Adult adoptees, adoptive parents, birthparents, prospective adoptive parents, spouses, partners and extended family members are especially encouraged to attend. Co-Sponsored by Ohio Birthparent Group & Adoption Network ClevelandOhio Birthparent Group is excited to partner with to bring this much-needed General Meeting to the Central Ohio area.  For those utilizing ANC’s Search Assistance programs, attendance at our Central Ohio meetings can be used toward ANC’s . This Central Ohio meeting is facilitated by peers who experience adoption as birthparents, adoptive parents and adoptees. There is no cost to attend and no RSVP is needed. For more program information, visit . About Ohio Birthparent Group What We Do Ohio Birthparent Group is a non-profit organization committed to supporting the Continue Reading →

I am a New York City person.  I  know this  for a fact, not only because I love Manhattan and feel at home there, but all of the theatre people I know in the city tell me I belong there. Unfortunately, my life in the Big Apple was hijacked before I was born.  My birthparents were inconvenient enough to have spawned me in a “tourist cabin” on the back Akron-Massillon Road (or someplace like that) and my adoptive parents, thoughtless of my needs, remained in Ohio. My amom, though, for reasons known only to her, decided I should be a copywriter or a graphic artist, neither of which I had much talent for. If I’d followed her command you’d be watching me, not Peggy Olsen on Mad Men–unless I decided to play out a Ronna Jaffe career girl and throw myself out a window or take bottle of Seconal after being used by Don Draper.  It didn’t help that I decided to get married when I did, cutting short any chance of ever having a real life. That last sentence is stupid, of course, but that’s how I thought back then.. What does this have to do with New Year’s Continue Reading →

Merry Christmas or whatever you’re doing,to all my bastard buddies and readers.  You’re the best! There’s an adoptee message in this too – sorta. Love the Baby Box–and Kate Smith!

Vaclav Havel, playwright, dissident, former Czech president  died today at the age of 75. His obituary is all over the media. My favorites are the Christian Science Monitor’s, Vaclav Havel:  Remembering the Czech President, Playwright, and Peacenik   David Remnick’s, Postscript: Vlaclav Havel, 1936-2011 in the New Yorker online. I have always believed there is a seamless line between art and politics (excluding Hollywood hacks, HuffPo progs, and Thomas Kinkade). I’m not sure if art or poliltics came first for me, but they have always been one in the other.  Mississippi Freedom Riders, Tuli Kupferberg, Yippie! the early Yoko Ono, Merce Cunningham, Charlotte Moorman, Norman Mailer, Gene McCarthy,  Gore Vidal, Beckett, Ionesco, Big Bill Haywood, The Velvet Underground, Randolph Bourne, Gilbert Seldes, Alfred Nock.  Even Thomas Jeffrerson and Beethoven are part and parcel of my political package tied up in a big red ribbon by Emma Goldman. So, it’s not strange that I came to Havel through theatre, not politics.  I’m hardly an expert on him so I won’t try to write about him.  I want, however, to post a couple things–or rather point you to them.  I am particularity fond of Havel’s essay,  Totalitarianism  and Stories,  (April 1987), which weaves Continue Reading →