Transcript of 27 January 2006 at  the Berkeley Hillside Club

There's a bunch of things I've been wanting to write about. One was what I was calling "The enlightened cynic's guide to eldercare -or- homicidal impulses are normal" (the minute your elder ends up in the hospital, throw everything of value in a safe-deposit box); another one was a non-pornographic coffeetable book on sex and technology (porno karaoke materials, science of dildoes and vibrators!). Another was something about Vietnam-era draft dodgers in this country --- I had been thinking about them because I had been thinking about the former Soviet-bloc and Eastern Europe and what happens when you kill generation after generation of the people who would speak out and do good and have integrity and how that rots a culture --- and how did that affect us, that our best and brightest went to Canada. But the story that haunts me, that desperately needs to be told, is, like any good story, a long story.
In a way it's been with me for years and years, and it begins in childhood where Freud would say all good stories begin.
And I guess (I can't speak German) it's a bildungsroman - a story of a young person coming of age. It starts off when I was in what we would now call middle school, during the years I spent at the local public school between my progressive hippy-trippy Quaker-inflected early childhood education and my later rigorous preparation at a snotty girls' school.

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