 Red Room Writer Profile
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Jacquelyn Mitchard's Blog
June 26, 2009
- Michael Jackson was hardly cold when a perky anchor-ette from Entertainment Weekly popped up on CNN outside UCLA Medical Center with a scoop -- a photo of the dying singer inside the ambulance as paramedics worked to resucitate him (although one was evidently hoping his cell-phone battery would last). "Wow," said Larry King, in the same tone of voice Walter Cronkite used when we, as ...
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June 3, 2009
- How many times has it happened to you?You think of an idea for a story or a novel and it's a winner; it can't lose; you feel as though you're just taking time for a stroll aorund the park before you turn in your Power Ball winner.And it's not three days before you learn:Somebody else thought of it. Not someone long ago -- you're not channeling Charlotte Bronte. A friend thought of it and is ...
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May 28, 2009
- Fijians don't have a word for stress.I just watched five strong men bury a gigantic fish and packages of breadfruit bound with coconut bark in a pit of hot stones, then cover it to cook under huge leaves of the elephant ear tree. When they finished, they all cried, "Bula!" which is the Fijian word for hello and about everything else joyous. This "lavoro," or feast, is given ...
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May 26, 2009
- I have plagiarized. Once.And it was inadvertent.That can happen. At the time, I thought I had changed my own prose enough so that it didn't read like the sources it came from but I hadn't and also, I had no original sources -- only the ones I offered in my bibliography. It was many years ago. I was desperate for money and very young (this is not a defense, but a description). Assigned by a ...
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February 19, 2009
- I'm in Fiji this morning for work. It's beautiful, balmy, welcoming and about as far from the two feet of snow we left behind as any place we could find on this green earth. But the swimming and the sunshine and the abundance of the Fijian people and their lush landscape isn't the best part of this visit. It's this: Every single person we meet-from the village elder to the Australian footballers ...
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October 8, 2008
- 8 p.m. La Guardia --- The people left here tonight either have somewhere they have to go that's life and death or have lost all hope. All the bathroom floors are wet; the coffee machines are empty and I'm sitting next to a woman who either is Amy Weinstein or channeling her. v. bad.8:30 p.m. -- Someone turns on the second debate between Senators McCain and Obama. Much comment on Obama's purple ...
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October 7, 2008
- Monday morning: Woke up at 1 a.m. to the sound of my husband saying, "Wake up. Wake up. The dog is puking." I am the designated dog-puke tsar. I asked him to deal with it and went back to sleep. v. good.Monday afternoon: Paid for my luggage for the first time yesterday. $40. Lady next to me hadn't flown since her son's wedding, seven years ago. Nearly burst into tears when she had to ...
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October 6, 2008
- Unlike Peggy Noonan, who wrote poignantly a few days ago about Gate 14 being a small town of Americans who all looked shamed and wouldn't meet each other's eyes and didn't quite understand why their city on a hill. In other words, she mourned the glory days of the Reagan administration -- when both Ronald Reagan and Peggy had good hair -- didn't exist anymore. Never mind that it never did. ...
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October 6, 2008
- Unlike Peggy Noonan, who wrote poignantly a few days ago about Gate 14 being a small town of Americans who all looked shamed and wouldn't meet each other's eyes and didn't quite understand why their city on a hill. In other words, she mourned the glory days of the Reagan administration -- when both Ronald Reagan and Peggy had good hair -- didn't exist anymore. Never mind that it never did. ...
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October 5, 2008
- If Sara Palin were President of the United States, I would be as smart as the President of the United States.If Sara Palin were President, I could understand everything she says, because she doesn't use adult vocabulary.If Sara Palin were President, then I could be President, too -- right now.If Sara Palin were President, all the parodies on YouTube would not be funny. In fact, they're not very ...
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October 3, 2008
- Once in a while, she reminded me, in a cute way, of my friend's older sister, who says "Gosh darn it" when she's angry.And maybe she's a nice lady and only mean as spit when she's riled.And maybe she's a mean lady, who's just charming when she needs to be.And I would trust Joe Biden with my kids, and with any day of the week.But there were plenty of moments, during the first ...
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September 14, 2008
- Silly man Paul Krugman writes on the Times' Op-Ed page that the recent scattershot of claims from the McCain-Palin campaign have one thing in common -- that they're "out-and-out lies."And he adds, the need for the Obama-Biden ticket to fend off the foolishness could actualy DISTRACT from a real debate about the issues! Poor earnest fellow! What's he trying to prosecute here? ...
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September 9, 2008
- It was a sunny day, like this day, when 70,000 people stood in the street that leads from the Capitol to the University in my home town. Bruce Springsteen was singing, but I was mad that he was singing some silly old fotched-up political song instead of 'Born To Run,' which I thought the tall guy next to him, John Kerry, actually was.It was the day before the presidential election, four years ...
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September 6, 2008
- I should be shouting from the rooftops, and especially telling my two little girls, age nine and twelve, how exciting it is to be alive in an era in which a woman came just ... that close to being President of the United States and now a woman is actually running for the second highest office in the land.How sad that I can't.As Gloria Steinem is only the most recent to say, it's not that it's a ...
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September 6, 2008
- It takes a brave woman to embrace a baby with disabilities, and I was touched when I read Sarah Palin's quote wondering whether she could fully do so when she learned that her baby, Trig, had Down Syndrome, before he was born.It takes a woman ambitious beyond reckoning to use the fact that she chose to bear instead of abort that potential life as political fodder.Many a woman over 35 who's had a ...
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