Dr. Mae's Blog

I will admit that, having acquired few housekeeping skills in my formative years, I must have been the world’s most inept au pair. Living in Paris during the 1960s changed this dubious distinction. The French family that I worked for was tolerant, if not amused, at my underdeveloped culinary skills and my less than stellar attempts at keeping their apartment immaculate. Rather than giving me walking papers, I was taken under Madame’s wing. She had been kind enough to hire me in the first place, and continued that kindness with lessons on how to be a careful shopper by treating each purchase as if it were solid gold. Madame knew every shopkeeper and vendor at the local open-air market. She was solicitous about each item and would not bring home a piece of fruit or cheese without first giving it a taste. The family lived in a floor-through apartment near the Champs-Elysées, a space belonging to the matriarch, Madame’s mother, who sat down with the entire family every afternoon for a midd...

The Reeperbahn is a street in Hamburg St. Pauli district, one of the two centers of Hamburg's nightlife and also the city's red-light district. In German it is also sometimes described as die sündigste Meile (the most sinful mile). My 6 years in Europe began with a trip across the Atlantic on the Yugolinia. a freighter. The cost was $108 to travel between Brooklyn and Casablanca. My companion was a casual friend who  had relatives in Greece where we were headed. At the last minute she told me that they had not responded to her; leaving us without a destination. I remembered a friend from acting class whose husband was accompanying opera singers in East Berlin, and she was more than happy to welcome us to the then divided city. Berlin, was and exciting place to be during volatile years of the early 1960’s. I had arrived penniless and quickly found work as hatcheck girl in the most popular bar and Discotheque in West Berlin the Old Eden Salon. Most everyone that I knew was impov...

 Meeting on The Rainbow Bridge Rainbow Bridge. A fictional bridge that serves as a meeting place for pets who have passed on and their beloved owners. The bridge is small and illuminated by an exquisite sunset. As we move closer we see Mae (Owner) sitting with  Pudgie   (Dog). They are sitting side by side on the edge of the bridge which is low to a silent pond.  Mae's feet dangle as she sits with Pudgie, who joyfully watches her every movement. Characters:  Pudgie: A selfish arrogant Pug dog, that considers herself  better than others of her species-deceased in 1981  Mae: The owner of Pudgie, who owned, loved, and traveled with a dog that was known as ‘the most obnoxious in the world’ for sixteen years Time: Present Place: Outside of the The Rainbow Bridge, where a dog comes to meet his master or mistress and share times past before crossing the bridge. Pudgie (Agitated) Well, where have you been? All of these damn dogs are driving me crazy. The...

The Living Theater, popped up in my life during high school when I was apprenticing at the North Jersey Playhouse. My recollection is that some of the actors we worked with might have performed in Many Loves by William Carlos Williams. I do remember getting to know  Ken Brown the author of The Brig, with whom I had heated conversations at Max’s Kansas City. Something about the theater  attracted me but  also kept me away. My arrival in Berlin, came a short time before the Living got there. The company had left the United States for what was to be a long period of wandering, creativity and debauchery.  I was excited that they would be in Berlin and as I remember performing in a small second floor theater something like the place over a laundromat where La MaMa started on 2nd Avenue. With their arrival the Kurfurstendamm was alighted with all kinds of characters. I loved them especially LeRoy (Rain) House and Steven Ben Israel who shared the original script of Frankens...

In November, as first discussed in last month’s Parenting Pearls column, I traveled to Haiti as one of a leadership team for the Urban Zen Foundation. As trained integrative therapists (UZITs) our objective was to ascertain whether the techniques that we continue to study and hone would provide some respite, particularly to workers, administration and volunteers at St. Damien’s Hospital, the largest and free pediatric hospital in the country. The results were affirmative and each succeeding team of UZITs has met with success. On arrival at the airport in Port Au Prince, we were met by a driver from St. Damien’s. Jumping into the back of the flat-bed truck we slowly made our way along the crowded one-lane street of the dense city. People everywhere were selling goods from improvised shelters, tents still housed millions displaced by the earthquake, and half-built cinder-block buildings were left untended. Passing the United Nations headquarters in Haiti, we saw barbed-wire encased compo...

My initial goals as an educator were to work in a hospital or therapeutic setting with allied professionals. Unfortunately, when I completed my doctorate the country was immersed in recession and no such positions were available. Bringing together my resources and bucking up, I opened a learning center where my work included counseling and mentoring, a far cry from the hospital work I had originally intended. Then, at a time in my life when it was possible, I read about the Urban Zen Integrative Therapist program and the circle began to close. I have just returned from an Urban Zen Integrative Therapist leadership trip to Haiti. This was the first of seven trips in the coming months for program mentors and current students to NPH St. Damien Hospital outside of Port-au-Prince. St. Damien Hospital, funded totally by donations and with a mission motivated by the “gospel command to care for the sick and to offset the injustices of poverty and unemployment which make healthcare inaccessible...

”The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” — Attributed to Albert Einstein. Many of us live our lives thinking of time as a noun, remembering the past or projecting into the future. When the time we experience is a verb, the very present of our experience is colored by how we have built a past, certainly, but also as preparation for the future. It is a formidable job to truly capture that present. Time as the noun, by remembering past experiences, is what attracted me to the Urban Zen Integrative Therapist (UZIT) program (www.urbanzen.org). I was drawn to the training by relating it to experiences from years back when I worked at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. My assignment then was in a research study of severely autistic preschool children. The team was composed of the Child Psychiatrist Stella Chess, Magda Campbell, a psychopharmologist, and from Bank Street College of Education, Elsbeth Pheiffer. You could not have found a more formidable group. E...

The time: memories, the decade: the 1970s, which ominously began with the trials of Charles Manson and his cohorts as my beloved 1960s faded, but have not been forgotten by historians and hippie makeovers. For those who lived through the 1960s, the 70s were a time of reckoning, a time of growing, and as in all decades, some people made their mark and left the planet. Reading Patti Smith’s memoir, “Just Kids,” brought me back to that time and my one and only meeting with this poet-singer-songwriter icon at a friend’s apartment on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. There she was in all her splendid androgyny, dressed in faded Levi’s, wearing a starched oversized men’s shirt. Not saying a word, Smith walked straight to the bathroom, left the door open and mightily proceeded to relieve herself. Then with total aplomb, but without flushing, she walked from the bathroom, as if the act were part of a performance. As the 70’s dawned, Vietnam lingered on and (Richard M.) Nixon pledged to ...

I boarded the Greyhound at the Port Authority Bus Station in New York en route to Bemidji, Minn., with about $40 in my pocket, gifts from the actors at the North Jersey Playhouse for my 16th birthday. My destination was the only summer stock company that accepted me as an apprentice. I later understood why: this company did not require an audition, which I had dutifully prepared for other companies to which I applied but was roundly rejected, and I had only submitted my resume in pencil. Having spent the prior four years as an apprentice at the Playhouse, then in Fort Lee under the direction of the late mystery writer Robert Ludlum, I felt it was time to get some experience a little further afield. My friends at the Playhouse were supportive, but dubious about such a big step for a young girl, but I was determined to try my hand at what I romantically conceived to be the summer stock experience. Little did I know that what awaited me in Bemidji was more like indentured servitude. The b...

Some time ago, while reading the Sunday "New York Times," I came across a familiar name, one that triggered memories from the distant past. The year was 1983, and I had recently opened a storefront-learning center on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn. It was a vivid neighborhood alive with children's voices in a myriad of languages. My little business was thriving, and one of the most exciting parts was having time to sit down with parents and discuss plans for their children. One of my students was 13, an age at which, in New York, children prepare to go to high school. Many take very competitive tests or audition for special schools. Thus, I was not at all surprised when a parent came into the learning center and said nervously, "I think that you may be able to help my sister; something terrible has happened. "I did not realize what she was talking about until she said the little boy's name: David Rothenberg. His picture was all over the neighborhood, and ...

“Listen to the histories of survivors without shaming or blaming or prejudice. However difficult it may be to listen to our histories, it is a critical way in which you can help our healing.”* The word Survivor often conjures the top-rated reality show in which stranded individuals connive, outwit, and manipulate their way to a million dollar prize. Real life Survivors are not often found on television, may never accumulate a million dollars, look great in a bathing suit, or travel more than a few miles from their hometown. These individuals have managed to make a life for themselves after a childhood of abuse and/or neglect. Abuse takes many forms: emotional, physical, neglect, and sexual. It does not discriminate and is found in homes of all social classes and ethnicities. The perpetrators are most often family members, neighbors, or pillars of a community, as the sexual abuse by priests in the Boston so tragically exposed. Scars from abuse form a hard protective shell around victims...

James S. Gordon, founder of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM) in Washington D.C., and a professor at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, was a keynote speaker at the Urban Zen Well-Being Speakers Series (www.urbanzen.org) on April 14 in New York City as part of the Urban Zen Initiatives. These initiatives include well being, empowering children, and preserving cultures. Dr. Gordon’s resume is long and filled with a multitude of achievements. He has traversed the world from one troubled spot to the other, working with victims to help heal the wounds of war, poverty and deprivation. He was one of the first to speak out and write about the benefits of an integrative approach to medicine and over the years, faced the criticism accorded many visionaries. He has never denied the benefits of Western medical advances, but rather advocates that they should be complemented with many of the practices that have been integral to Eastern medicine for centuries. Among the alternative...

It was fall, the little room on West 12th Street in Greenwich Village smelled of lemon soap in decorative apothecary jars. The tiny room was completely cluttered with objects, feathers of all colors, antique bird cages,glass jars, and a large map of Paris with Rue de Rivoli highlighted. I sat on the small single bed with a brass headboard wearing a wide brimmed hat, white tee shirt and Levi’s. Mario, my best friend, had recently come out and  we were  eager to share our latest adventures. For about a year, we had been meeting every day after I finished working at Pinata Party on MacDougal street. My boss knew everyone in the neighborhood, and visitors often outnumbered customers. I made about forty three dollars every week which was just about sufficient to pay for acting classes at the Herbert Berghof (HB) Studio on Bank From then on we were a pair, making paper roses what we sold bar to bar in the evenings. Scouring the hat district in the West 30’s to find inexpensive unblo...

Henry Sutton, was the stage manager at the North Jersey Playhouse, where I was an apprentice and bit player throughout high school. He was born in Burma, to a missionary family returned to the United States to attend college at Catholic University. From the first he took me under his wing, even though I was poorly prepared for the position. He noticed that I had no idea how to use a broom, and that my background had not provided any household skills. With patience and multiple failures he not only taught me the art of sweeping but how to eat with a knife and fork. Henry called me “Mae Darling”, and approved of my very being, which was a new feeling. He introduced me to all of the other gay actors many of whom were personal friends and made sure that the directors gave me small roles in plays. When it was time to strike the sets, I would put on a record and sing Slow Boat to China, the only song that I knew.  Henry’s affection was met with my loyalty and reciprocity. When, I left Ne...

Clarence was the handyman at Sunny Oaks a  hotel in the Catskill Mountains of New York, where my father sent me every summer after my mother died. He knew the owner from volunteering at the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Brooklyn. I loved going to the mountains, where I had little supervision and could spend my days swimming and rock climbing and nights talking to Clarence. He was from the south and came up north to Philadelphia with his wife Theola and their son Willy. Clarence was a very religious Southern Baptist and I considered him to be my second father. Every night we would sit out near the shed on a bench near where the garbage was kept and he would tell me stories about his life down south. Once, Clarence asked Theola to comb my hair; which was unruly and unkempt. “Every little girl has to have someone comb their hair real nice and you have such pretty curls” Theola took me up to the attic room where I stayed and spent what must have been  hours, combing out the knots. W...

Memories of my mother are dim, but must suffice. One day we sat on the grass shelling peas. Another day, we got on a bus somewhere under the George Washington Bridge on the New York side, my mother said, “ We were escaping to nowhere”.  We went away with her to Sunny Oaks, I remember laying with my head on her stomach which had a scar that seemed endless. The Italian neighbors, who lived behind us tried to keep her healthy with vegetable drinks from their truck garden. It was confusing.  Our house was hectic people cried all the time, my brother and I were kept out of her room. Relatives came, remember them yelling at us to keep quiet, nurses moved in until the ambulance arrived. She was gone, don’t remember talking to her, or saying that I loved her. We went to the hospital and had to stay on the street and wave to a window, which one, who knows. Came home, and I waited for her to come back, she did not. Found out she was dead from our housekeeper, I ran out of the house with...

Childhood, what was that? I couldn’t wait for it to end. The first eighteen months, I was the little princess, and then my brother was born. This should have been a happy time, but I still remember the loud noises coming from my parents’ room. Another eighteen months, and another brother was born. I learned later that she did not want to get pregnant and was trying to escape. That opportunity did not come because no sooner did my brother come home then my mother was diagnosed with cancer. Surgery and hospitalizations followed, a full time nurse moved into the house to care for her, until the last hospital stay. Never got the chance to say goodbye. Her wish was that we live with her family, my father refused, forbidding us to see them ever again. No sooner had my mother died when all of her pictures were gone; her name was never mentioned as if never having existed. My father disappeared into his own world and never again mentioned my mother’s name. He took away all of her memorabilia a...

There was a time when a vacation meant getting in the car and traveling several hours from home for a respite in the country. If you were from the tri-state area, this might mean the Catskill Mountains, or as they were more colloquially known, the “Jewish Alps”. People often went to the same resorts or bungalow colonies for years, foraging friendships, bringing up children, and aging. My father’s friend was the owner of Sunny Oaks, a small resort in Woodridge, N.Y. This hotel held many memories for me. It was the place my mother recuperated after the surgery for the cancer that killed her a few short months later. After she was gone, it was the place the proprietors welcomed me, summer after summer, to live as one of their own children. It was the place where I spent hours swimming in a pool, running barefoot, never taking showers, and coming home with a head full of lice. And it was here at Sunny Oaks that I met one of the most important people in my early life: Clarence, the handyman...

Years ago, while attending graduate school at Columbia University Teachers College, I was unsure about which area of special education to pursue. It seemed the only way to decide with any integrity was to spend time with the people who made up these special populations. As an undergraduate, I volunteered at a home for individuals with orthopedic handicaps. My assignment was to work with an older adult who had severe Cerebral Palsy. He was a writer, and in those days of manual typewriters, he could not reach the keys without support. He was extremely frustrated and lamented how lonely he was having a sharp mind whose body could not cooperate. Other positions included volunteering at a center for delinquent teenagers, tutoring the learning disabled, and working with acting-out children. I found my niche in counseling. There was a highly regarded program in White Plains called the Center for Preventive Psychology. One focus of the center was helping bereaved children through the process o...