Cooking

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During a timed writing with my online writers’ group, I spun a true tale about cooking. When I finished, I had two stories. The first one I sent to The Sun Magazine. It was their prompt after all. The second one focused on a moment in 1968, New Year’s eve. It belongs here.

Our New Year’s Eve progressive dinners were legendary. We were living in Lawrence, Kansas at the time, teaching at the university. Five couples planned the order of the meal, beginning with cocktails and hors-d’oeuvre at the first house, progressing in our black-tie attire to the next house a block away for the soup course. Salad at the next and by ten-thirty or so, we arrive at our house for the main course. One friend was an airline pilot who had brought live lobster from Maine. They were in a tank in our garage. I had instructed the babysitter to get the great canning kettle to a boil by 10:30, whereupon she could go to bed in the guest room next to where the children were sleeping. The crisp night air cleared the palate and the brain after cocktails and wine pairing with each course. The merriment grew with each walk. Don and I rushed ahead to get those lobsters into the boiling water and warm the garlic-butter and sour-dough bread. The others came through the door laughing, ready for this epicurean high-point, lobsters in Kansas.

The wives carried coats, scarfs, gloves, and purses up to our master bedroom, powdered their noses, and came down to dinner. At midnight champagne corks flew into the garden, a scuffling of chairs so everyone could kiss everyone else.

Dessert awaited half a block down the street. The men climbed the stairs to retrieve the coats and came down one by one, puzzling, hands patting down the inside pockets, the outside pockets, fishing in the sleeves for their scarfs. The women watched, took their coats, then opened their purses. Keys, where were the keys? The scarfs, the gloves? Merriment turned sour, accusatory. Instead of filing out to dessert, there was a terrible milling around in the front hall. Embarrassed, I went upstairs and opened the door to where our daughters slept. There in the middle of the floor in a swirl of color were the ladies’ scarfs, the men’s scarfs in the outer circle like a fortress wall, and in the center of the mound of cloth, keys. I gathered them all and descended to the sullen crowd. I opened my hands to grabbing fingers and harrumphing snarls as the scarfs, gloves, and keys sorted themselves out.

We stumbled out of our front door muttering, wondering, puzzling what had come into the minds of four little girls. How they had awakened so late and stolen into the master bedroom to find fox and sable coats, silk, and cashmere scarfs, jangling keys to carry off to their room? The retelling of the story as we tasted the chocolate mousse and the crème brûlée of our final course became the theme of the New Year. Told with peals of laughter, laughter with an edge. “Don’t trust anyone, not even your children.”

Richard Nixon became the thirty-seventh president on January 20th. Tricky Dick would take more than pretty scarfs and keys.

2021-12-30

Kill your Darlings!

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On a two week road trip recently, I listened to Steven King’s On Writing–twice. It revolutionized the way I approach my craft. This post is about his advice on revision. “Kill your Darlings!

I wanted to write a short story based on my experience in the 80s of working for MCI, the telecommunications company that broke up AT&T, and the Baby Bells. In the five years I spent with the company in outside sales, I learned a lot about how the phone system works–getting my voice to come out on the other end of the line to a person I care about far away–and was terrifically excited about the technology. I was using intra-office email before email was a thing. I was using an IBM computer with floppy discs before most ordinary people had access to such a thing as a personal computer. There were courses at a local community college in such things. I took them.

Putting this into my short story bored my critique group readers. No one cares. What happens to the protagonist when she gets into this technology?

Many mini-stories, encounters with customers and prospects, fellow sales people, my family made for good material, or so I thought. Stringing them all together made my readers laugh, but in the end, they were episodic and did not further the development of my main character. And she always triumphed. How does the reader root for a person who so easily overcomes problems and never gets knocked on her toosh?

The final version is not a memoir at all. I threw out many Little Darlings. I hate for them to lie on the cutting room floor (to mix metaphors) never to see the light. Isn’t giving a platform for these scenes I enjoyed writing a place to land what this blog is for? I think so.

Local color vignettes:

I had my Pee Chee folder with ten sales orders in one pocket, pens, and fliers in the other and we were off. Libby crosses the West Seattle bridge to an area of town I had never visited. We headed for 35th, a north-south arterial, and stopped a the first business, a Volvo specialty mechanic. I watched her launch herself forward, her open hand thrust out.

We spent another hour and a half going business to business, one-story establishments clustered around major cross streets—Morgan Junction, Admiral Junction, Alaska Junction.

When we each had four, we quit and headed to Endolyne Joe’s for a sandwich. The place had served a trolley that brought vacationers from Seattle on a paddle wheeler back in the day. I was getting a history lesson about the origins of Seattle along with an idea of how to convert businesses from AT&T to MCI.

The Westin and Issaquah

Thai Airways was one of my accounts. I enjoyed my monthly meeting with my contact, a German-born man about my age who lived in Issaquah. We met at Trader Vik’s in the Westin Hotel. We would order Stoli’s on the rocks and settle in for a gossip session about the Thai government and how every branch of the nationalized utilities and businesses and of course, the airline, were all headed by some Royal playboy who knew nothing of the operations. All of Thailand, my contact assured me, was managed by a web of foreign nationals, or educated military who operated beneath the public eye and kept things profitable and free of family quarrels. My goal was to trouble shoot any connectivity issues and to get the airlines to use the vanity 800 number I had secured. 1-800-THAIAIR. I described what the billboard in downtown Seattle would look like with the number emblazoned just below the sultry smile of the most beautiful Thai stewardess in the Kingdom. No luck. Mr. Germany turned the conversation to a lament about Issaquah losing its airport to development. Gone were the pleasant evening cocktails on his deck overlooking the grass landing strip. No more balloon rides. No more small planes lifting gliders into the atmosphere. No more skydivers whose chutes always opened as they screamed through the upper reaches and then bobbed like seed pods floating with the wind.

Issaquah Airport, no longer in use or even present.

In my real life as a sales person with MCI, I won several Winner’s Circle trips. They were stellar experiences. On one ….. here’s the scene, none of which ends up in the final version. All it furthers in the story is one more example of a wife becoming independent, fun but unnecessary.

Despite my failure at golf, I landed the regional award weekend, making the Winner’s Circle with one point above the next in the pecking order. Winners could bring their spouses. My husband was thrilled. Don had never been to Tucson. We bounced along dirt tracks to an Anasazi site, ate a bar-be-Que in a sage-dotted dessert, and witnessed a tribal dance performed by local indigenous people. We strolled the grounds of the luxurious resort tucked into the hills outside of town.

Early the next morning, I left our unit before sunrise to take a run on the golf course. Following the track along the edge of the fairway, I came around a curve and was stopped in my tracks by a smallish orange balloon. The crew worked the bellows. When it lifted above the basket, I could read MCI, black letters on the orange background. I jogged over and asked if I could go.

“Are you a winner,” they asked.

“Yes.” I displayed my winner t-shirt.

“Get in.”

“Can I call my husband?”

 “No time. The couple who won this ride is late. You might as well take their place. We have to get airborne now.”

I climbed in next to another MCI salesperson, feeling self-conscious about my appearance in a running outfit, no make-up or hairdo. We hardly spoke. There was plenty of noise as the balloon gained altitude, then silence as we floated low over the resort. Worried about Don and how long I would be gone, I called down to a man in an MCI t-shirt standing on his balcony.

“Call my husband in room C-29 and tell him where I am.” The guy nodded. With that detail taken care of, I relaxed into the magic of floating silently with the wind. I heard a jack rabbit thump the ground. I looked down into saguaro flowers impossible to see from below. The orange MCI sag-wagon sped along the dirt road beneath us. Images of around the World in 80 Days went through my mind. Such freedom from all things mechanized. The balloonist brought us down in a cactus-filled field. On the drive back to the resort, I started to worry about my husband. He, I discovered upon arrival, had not gotten the message, and had called the resort personnel frantic that something terrible had happened to me.

Champaign Sale

I was proud of this one and wanted to include it. It ended up on the floor, another Little Darling to jettison. It did not move the story to transformation. Just another pat on the back, memorable ego-enhancing scene no one really wants to read.

With the math and tech savvy I learned at Highline, I did increase the volume of business from several major corporations, including Allstate. I was grateful to Allstate’s IT guy, a teddy bear of a man with a grizzled beard and rounded paunch. He signed an order for the massive switch to MCI I had proposed. It was December 31st. The sale saved my status on the sales force. At nine o’clock on New Year’s Eve I drove to his house in SeaTac with a bottle of Mumm champaign. He welcomed me with Yuletide joy. Ma Bell made the inner circle once again.

Personal Shopper? Unbelievable.

Sometimes real life is unbelievable. I did engage a personal shopper at the Bon Marche to help me get a suitable wardrobe. My clothes worked for a Church Lady, not a young sales woman. My readers couldn’t believe such a thing existed. In the 80s, fine department stores still employed women who specialized in helping dress their insecure customers. Where are these women today? They neither exist nor are believable.

“I think I can do this, but I have nothing to wear beyond two suits and one pair of pumps. I can’t imagine dressing the way those two twenty-somethings do. I hate shopping.”

“Here. This is the card of a friend who is a personal shopper at the Bon. She will fix you up. And she is good with a tight budget.” I dialed the Bon Marche’s number from my cubical after handing in my sales contracts to the administrative side of the house. Terry Allen was available. Two hours later, I went home to show my husband, Don, my outside-sales-woman wardrobe, a brilliant mix and match of blouses, skirts, jackets, scarfs designed to soften my strong chin and imposing presence while looking professional.

It you want to read the final version, let me know. It is running about 4000 words, out there in the world of Submittable, waiting to be accepted.

I would love your comments. Please write. Betsy

Nuanced look at the #metoo women

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Recently This American Life [March 3rd, 2018] did a full hour radio program about five women who worked for the same man, Don Hazen of Alternet. The investigator, Chana Joffe-Walt explored not only the sexual harassment stories of these five women, but how their personal histories shaped the way they dealt with the harassment.

I listened to these women who ranged in age from late fifties to twenty-one tell their stories of how Hazen, executive at Alternet since the 80s, discovered each of them and gave them a career start. The five women ranged in age from Hazen’s life partner (60s) down the decades. The youngest, fresh out of college, was the whistle blower. Her growing up experience solidified her capacity to say no to unwanted advances and the expectation that she would be treated with respect. The women had stories about how they should expect men to behave and how they should respond that were more accepting of harrassment the older they were.

In time, perhaps four to five years from now, we will have greater understanding about how early childhood conditioning sets women up to be prey to predators.

I am writing a novel about a protagonist whose deep wound was inflicted by her father who predicted she would behave like an out-of-control slut unless she were severely controlled. His treatment of her as a sexual object set her up for a rebellious liaison with a boss years after her teenage violation.

I believe such stories will eventually contribute to how society raised its daughters and helps them own their bodies.

Is the memoir trust worthy?

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I  recently met with members of the history department at the University of Washington, professors who are interested in the Cold War. One, Professor Elena Campbell, born and raised in Russia’s closed military city where their nuclear submarines were manufactured, has memories of the Space Bridge contact between KING 5 TV and Glastelradio in 1985. She watched with the fascination of a young girl and worried that her city was the primary target of our NIKE missiles. Dr. Campbell is interested in oral history as one major source for her research and writing.

Our conversation turned to how much the historian can rely on oral history or written memoir for assembling the factual content of written history. These professors teach their students to beware of assuming a memoirist has the historic “truth” in their pages.

Professor Eric Johnson followed up on our conversation by sending me two articles that analyzed the problem of taking memoir as history. The first, and you can read it by clicking on this link. hudgins_autobiographers_lies-1, is a scrutiny by Andrew Hudgins of his own memoir, The Glass Hammer: A Southern Childhood. His article, printed in The American Scholar in 1996, is titled An Autobiographer’s Lies.

I commend it to you as you contemplate memoir. The byline of my blog comes from Ernest Hemmingway who said about his last work, the memoir of his early years in Paris The Moveable Feast, “all memoir is fiction”.  My Life as Fiction. The truth as best I can remember, yes. But…..

Enjoy, Betsy

Target Seattle

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If you google Target Seattle today, what you get is the location of the Target department store nearest you. In 1982-1984 Target Seattle had another meaning altogether. Try to imagine just how frightened US citizens were of the possibility of nuclear war and of the Soviets from the McCarthy communist witch hunt, the Cuban missile crisis to the shooting down of the Korean airliner in 1983. People were building bomb shelters. Children were practicing duck and cover drills in their school class rooms.

The threat became real to us in the Pacific NW when the first nuclear submarine, the USS Ohio, arrived at Bangor in August 1982.
People started asking if Seattle is a target, what could we do to keep bombs from falling? Leaders in this discussion emerged from the International YMCA in downtown Seattle, the local chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Ploughshares (former Peace Corps volunteers), KING-5 TV, University of Washington professors and lawyers from the progressive firm of McDonald Hogue and Bayless. Kay Bullitt, long time social justice activist and the name you see at the top of the list of sponsors of this exhibit, invited people to her house to discuss what could be done about Seattle’s position as a target. This group conceived of a ten-day series of educational events called Target Seattle: Preventing Nuclear War. The organizers chose my husband Aldon Duane Bell to chair the public events of the ten-day program.

I want to pause here to tell you that my early involvement was solely as Don’s wife. I followed along in the supportive role typical of women born before the Second World War. Many other women and men stepped into leadership positions immediately. Many would be more qualified to tell you all about the creation of Target Seattle and the important role this short-lived organization played in waking people up all across the country. My own leadership came later.

The central idea of Target Seattle is about waking up and taking action. We need to do that now, in 2018. In 1982 these were the stated goals.

  • The apocalyptic effects of nuclear war, to wake people up to the fact that nuclear war would be the end of everything we know and love. 750,000 people in the Puget Sound region were exposed to this reality through the press.
  • An awakening from lethargy, from apathy. Target Seattle would be the tool to rouse people to action, the front edge of a growing wave of anti-war activities across the world. Target Seattle wanted to turn fear into a sharp sense of concern, an awakening to the fact that we had entrusted our future to a small group of cold warriors who be intention or by accident could incinerate the whole earth.
  • An exploration of the alternatives: the Peace Through Strength position accompanied by the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which was the Reagan administration’s position; Unilateral Disarmament, the largest peace movement in the UK; the Nuclear Freeze Campaign, adopted by many faith based organizations and the Democratic Party. David Brower reminded us that love is a resource we will love if we forget to use it.
  • Target Seattle strove to inspire people, ordinary citizens, to take action. First by becoming informed. Study the situation. Then, armed with facts, talk to our elected officials and ultimately require them to take action which reflects the views of the American people.

Major players in each of these movements from the government to opinion makers were invited to speak at large public forums, the first of which was held in the Paramount Theater on Sept. 24th, 1982. Then came a week of teach-ins at noon-day brown bag lunches held in a downtown church and evening lectures in Meany Hall at the University of Washington. We were learning.

The week-long program ended with a King Dome events involving thousands of spectators, many speakers and dramatic presentations, a kind of anti-nuclear circus heavy with purpose. Dr. Helen Caldicott, president of the International Physicians for Social Responsibility, a pediatrician from Australia was the key note speaker. Her description of what nuclear annihilation looks like was graphic and painful.

While all this planning was going on, four women, Ann Stadler, Virginia McDermott, Lucy Dougall and Kathleen Braden decided to write a love letter asking people in Seattle’s sister city, Tashkent in Uzbekistan, to join us in working to prevent nuclear war. The peace letter said:

The people of Seattle and Tashkent are united through the Sister City Program, through our love for our cities, and through the hopes we share for our children’s futures. Yet if there is a nuclear war, all that we value would be destroyed. . .. We must work together to create peaceful means of resolving conflicts and take steps to reduce the danger of nuclear war.

This letter was printed in English and Russian, the Cyrillic script below the English. The 8 ½ x 14 inche sheets had room for signatures in the manner of a petition. Committee members, friends and family carried copies of this letter to the various events, to churches, to schools and most of all to the final King Dome event. In all 42,000 signatures were gathered on about 3000 pieces of paper.

At the bottom of each letter was printed the promise This letter will be sent to Seattle’s Russian sister city, Tashkent, and to government officials of the Soviet Union and the United States.
After the public events of Target Seattle, the committee met to consider two objectives:
1. How to get the letters to our Sister City in Uzbekistan?
2. What about the Russians?

The teach-ins and talks had covered the American approach but left everyone with the question, what did Russia want? What was their position?

The letters were a voluminous problem Virginia McDermott tried to get them on a plane with a group of travelers heading to Tashkent, but missed that opportunity. As a lark, really, it was decided that we would go as tourists. The itinerary was Moscow, Tashkent, Samarkand and Leningrad as St. Petersburg was called in those days. We engaged a travel agency and thirty-two people signed up.

At this point we connected with Rosanne Royer, wife of mayor Charles Royer and president of the Seattle Tashkent Sister City committee. We wanted to ask if the trip could be sponsored by them and we could officially represent the sister city organization.

The story of this trip will be published soon by Epicenter Press in Kenmore, WA. It is called Open Borders, A personal story of love, loss and anti-war activism. It is my memoir set during the decade of 1982-1992 and traces our trip. The story follows the creation and dissemination of a multimedia slide show after the trip and the promotion of the Seattle style anti-nuclear movement.

Virginia and Don were the official leaders of the trip. Marlow Boyer was the photographer. Our daughter Ruth and I both went along. There were four other young people, a journalist, two doctors, a lawyer, an insurance salesman, a clergyman, wives and husbands, single women, all paid their own way. We prepared for the trip by inviting Soviet experts to coach us on how to behave, what to say when engaged in conversation. We all took the peace petitions in our suitcases and took our responsibilities as advocates for friendship and love very seriously.

In Moscow we met the chair of the Soviet Peace Committee, Yuri Zhukov. In Tashkent the mayor and his staff spread the red carpet of welcome for us. There were speeches, concerts, school visits and a peace rally. Virginia remembers the conversation she had with the deputy mayor who said to her, “For years we’ve been waiting for you to come. I lost both of my sons and my husband in the war. I don’t want to lose my grandchildren.”

Trying to understand where the Russians were coming from inspired the 2nd Target Seattle: Soviet Realities. The program opened and closed with events televised by KING 5 TV. Over 500 small group gatherings reaching hundreds of people watched the shows and talked about the questions raised during the programs. Interest spread around the state as other towns felt themselves to be targets of Soviet aggression. Congressman Foley and US Senator Dan Evans co-chaired Target Washington, a signal day event held simultaneously in Yakima, Spokane and Vancouver.

The slide show helped stimulate the October 24th 1984 Target Washington events. The 27 minute multimedia slide show is now on DVD and You tube. Please find the earlier post on my web site and watch the full video there. It portrays our message of mutual concern with the people of Tashkent. The pictures and sound track blend the voices of Americans, Russians, and Uzbeks. As the faces blend one into another, by the end you are not sure who is American and who is Russian or Uzbek.

What we did here in Washington inspired cities around the country to stage their own Target events, involving their own citizens in an effort to learn about nuclear war and then work to prevent the unthinkable.

After the October conferences, the steering committee discussed their future purpose, took stock of the three Target Seattle events designed to educate and mobilize that occurred from 1982 to 1984 and the plethora of new organizations forming to continue peace-building through cultural exchanges. They decided to disband. The mission was accomplished—hundreds of people were involved in creating a future without nuclear war, a future of friendships across the continents.

By the end of the 1980s, dozens of cities across the United States would line up to request sister cities in the USSR. They saw Seattle as a model primarily because our connection with Tashkent never wavered in spite of the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR, the Korean airliner incident, and local pressure by Russian and Baltic Americans to exit the relationship. Many newly-organized Seattle groups—the Peace Chorus, the Peace Park builders, amputee soccer players, to name a few—traveled to or were planning trips to the USSR. In 1985 Seattleites and Soviet citizens saw and heard each other over a Space Bridge established by KING 5 and a Glastelradio TV hosted in Leningrad. Citizen diplomacy involving hundreds of people was taking off from both sides of the Iron Curtain. The warlike rhetoric coming from the Kremlin and the White House softened. By 1988 Gorbachev was in power. He and Reagan communicated in the conciliatory terms of glasnost.

Target Seattle had done its job. 1990 saw the Goodwill games here in Seattle. We need this again, perhaps more than ever. As I say in my book Through the latter half of the 20th century, as much as the Kremlin in Russia and the White House disagreed with how our world should be organized, one felt the leaders grasped their sober responsibility for the future of the whole world and genuinely did not want to put all that fire power to use.

Today, I am not so sure.

 

What can we do?

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As the storm clouds of nuclear build up gather, we might ask ourselves “what can we do?” as ordinary citizens to prevent nuclear war. Mayor Charlie Royer asked that very question in 1980. By 1984, thousands of people across Washington state and around the country were educating themselves about the threat to nuclear war.

The mayor’s words open the twenty-six minute multimedia show, now on you tube. This show was seen by hundreds of people between 1984 and 1990 up and down the east coast and in towns around the country. It was a bulky show to put on, with its 6 slide trays, two projectors, dissolve unit, speakers, wires and amplifier.

I took my grandchildren to see the Glosnost to Goodwill show at the Washington History Museum in Tacoma. “That’s Grandpa Don’s voice!” more than one grandchild declared. He died before all of them were born. The story of this trip is about to be pubished by Epicenter Press. OpenBorders.

A new movement is slowly emerging to take citizen diplomacy to world leaders to prevent the current threat of nuclear war. Who can imagine or tolerate the administration’s plans to devise an offensive technology for North Korea’s underground defense system? Can’t we talk?

Ever optomistic about the power of a small group of people determined to change the world, I remain,

Betsy Bell

writing this memoir

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Open Borders, A personal story of love, loss and anti-war activism.

Writing this memoir served two aims. Through the examination of a period of intense political activity in my life, I have been able to trace my passage to independence. Mine is the story of many women born during World War II and raised at a time when the prevailing expectation of women in America was that they’d marry, raise children, and be a supportive wife. This conflicted with the beliefs my parents had instilled in me. They’d sent me off on teenage adventures and challenged me to do anything I wanted in life. These messages fought for expression in my own development and early marriage to a man five and a half years my senior.

The second aim is political. During the 1980s a group of citizens in Seattle organized around a belief that ordinary people could influence governments to settle conflict through diplomacy rather than war. I took up one small piece of this peace-making effort and charged forward. Open Borders chronicles those efforts. Hundreds of other Seattleites and ordinary citizens across the country have stories to tell about their friendships across the Iron Curtain, all of which may have contributed to its fall in 1989. Four friends who were involved in such efforts have granted me permission to include an essay by each of them documenting how their life and work were affected by the anti-nuclear war efforts.

Writing Open Borders made me realize how proud I am of the many people who worked so hard in the 1980s to prevent nuclear war. We embraced our so-called enemies with curiosity, compassion, respect, and the firm belief that we all shared the common values of love of place and love of family. Nuclear war was not an option for us ordinary people. It would destroy all we hold dear.

Today, I am more frightened by the possibility of nuclear war than I was in 1982. I also feel alone. If there are others trembling before the “fire and fury” rhetoric and the repeating rocket and hydrogen tests, I hope this story of our activism will stir others to find ways to organize and seek peace through cross-border understandings of our common humanity and the love we each have for our homeland.

Why does it seem so few are alarmed at the threat of nuclear war today? Are we in denial or overwhelmed by the enormity of so many doomsday crises at once? Or have we, as I worry, left behind as antiquated that practice humans have engaged in for millennia of gathering in groups to work things out with minds firmly connected to hearts? Eye to eye conversations are much more effective than thumbs tapping through electronic devices. Through the latter half of the 20th century, as much as the Kremlin and the White House disagreed with how our world should be organized, one felt the leaders grasped their sober responsibility for the future of the whole world and genuinely did not want to put all that fire power to use. Today, I am not so sure. Putting words on paper is my way of taking up arms again. Action gives me hope.

Glasnost to Goodwill Exhibit open in Tacoma

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It’s here! The public record on display of citizen diplomacy in the Puget Sound area in the 1980s. Watch for it: Yours truly is on the big screen in the main exhibit room of the Washington State Historical Society Museum in Tacoma. You’ll learn all about what people were saying and doing about the threat of nuclear war before the current threat. Maybe you will be inspired to take some action yourself to prevent the horror from happening in our time.

Read my book, Open Borders, nearing publication date.

Citizen Diplomat

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Not everything belongs in a good story, even when the scene was an important one in the dramatic arc. Perhaps that is one service a blog offers a writer, giving her a place to share what will not be in the final version.
Not every title is the final and best one. I began Evil Empire as an exercise in Fiction Writing I at the UW under Scott Driscoll. The assignment was to describe someone getting a surprising bit of news. I chose to fabricate a moment in the trip Don, my first husband, and I took with thirty others to the Soviet Union in 1983. We went as tourists, but our objective was to deliver 3000 letters signed by 30,000 Seattlites to people in our sister city, Tashkent.

In the middle of our Tashkent visit, a large peace rally was staged. Don gets some very bad news just as he is about to deliver our message to the good people assembled to hear us.
That scene is in the middle of the first part of the story.
It turns out that the story Evil Empire had a subplot I needed a couple friendly readers to catch and explain to me. The story is really about the protagonist’s unconscious desire to step out from behind the dynamic leadership of her husband and take her own path. I have renamed the piece, Citizen Diplomat.
Here is the scene that ends up on the cutting room floor.
We checked into a Soviet-style modern hotel outside of central Moscow. Don and I joined an optional bus tour of the city, a Soviet version of the Gray Line tour. I wanted to keep moving while there was daylight, but the slate sky and leafless trees, concrete block buildings and empty streets could not keep me from dozing off. I jarred awake at the mention of the College of the Atlantic by a couple of young students. Their English accents called to mind our goddaughter, Elizabeth Ransome, who was a student in that little-known boarding school in Maine. It had been years since we had seen her, talked with her or written. Elizabeth, the young man informed us, was in Moscow but not on this tour. He gave us the name of their hostel and said she’d be there the next evening. What a coincidence. We told him who we were and to warn her that we would find her the following evening if at all possible. There were no cell phones or other methods of communication in 1983. The official plan for our evening was a performance of the Moscow Opera. How could we excuse ourselves from this event to find Elizabeth?

 
Back at the hotel, most of us caught up on much-needed sleep before a quick supper and bus trip to the Bolshoi Theater. What magnificence. The enormous gold and crystal chandelier sent shimmering light over the elegantly dressed crowd. Sable coats, long black gloves, fur hats and leather boots mingled with tuxedos and evening dress. The music of Russian conversation, strident to my ears, rose and fell. Opera goers spoke in tight groupings in the vast, high-ceilinged hall. The vaulted ceiling with its mosaic patterns, the arched windows with drawn red velvet curtains transported me to the time of Czar Alexander. The revolution and iron-fisted communist regime faded.

 At the intermission, Don and I took all our belongings and left through the great columned entrance to the nearest subway station. The few people on the street hurried along taking no notice of the Americans in their midst. Descending into the underground station was like visiting the catacombs. There was no sound coming from below. To our astonishment, we found the platform thronged with well-dressed people standing in complete silence. Was conversing in public a risk? Or were Russians taciturn and naturally private. We found their silence sinister.
Following the directions Vladimir had given us, we discovered our goddaughter and enjoyed a late night visit with her. After saying goodbye, Don and I stood outside Elizabeth’s hostel waiting for a taxi to take us to our hotel. We marveled at the synchronicity of finding her in Moscow. It got us thinking about the Refuseniks whose families were desperate for exit visas and freedom, the freedom we took for granted. Glancing around in the empty street beneath a cold starless sky, Don remarked that we could talk about them but only there, a solitary place. He wished we could get rid of the letters we carried for them while in Moscow, but he didn’t dare. If those film mailers ended up in the wrong hands and were traced back to our group, we would have risked everything. Marlow would have to keep them hidden and remain above suspicion until our last day in Leningrad. Hard as it was for me to keep a secret, I figured if so many people could keep silence on a crowded subway platform, so could I.
Thanks for reading.
I’d love to hear your stories of diplomacy or chilling experiences when visiting, living or working under totalitarian regimes.
May I live long enough to tell all my stories for then I will die contented.  Betsy

Hope in uncertain times

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“…creative intelligence is especially concerned with solving problems of meaning.” Justine Musk, blogger on writing.
Justine’s post on the power of story to find yourself is exactly what I’ve been doing with my urgent desire to write the stories of my life. Turns out that I have been more interested in the movie of the story’s action than in the self I was becoming.

Stories are how we shape and understand our reality.
We create the world we live in by the stories we choose to tell about it.
There’s a Hopi saying: Whoever tells the stories, rules the world. Justine
I’ve written pages describing life events and missed the inner voice, the emerging Betsy Bell who needed to tell these stories to find out who she was/is.
Citizen Diplomacy in Seattle in the 1980s, culminating with the Good Will Games, changed the direction of many people’s lives. They found their peacemaking voices. I’ve written this story from my husband, Aldon Bell’s and my point of view, but only now recognize how deeply held values from childhood pushed me to uncomfortable action. The kind of action Sam Adams took organizing the Boston Tea Party leading to the American Revolution, while his brother John Adams remained the gentleman negotiating with propriety. I’ve always identified with Sam Adams.

I’ve written this story from my husband, Aldon Bell’s and my point of view, but only now recognize how deeply held values from childhood pushed me to uncomfortable action. The kind of action Sam Adams took organizing the Boston Tea Party leading to the American Revolution, while his brother John Adams remained the gentleman negotiating with propriety.I’ve always identified with Sam Adams.

I’ve always identified with Sam Adams.
Back in 1976, our family returned from a year in South Africa, Rhodesia, Kenya, Eygpt, Greece, France, Italy and England to Boston. Boston was in the throes of the bicentenial celebration. One exhibit invited the viewer to participate vicariously in various events leading up to declaring our independence from English rule. At each event, we had the opportunity to line up with the actions of the various colonists. Don and I went through the exhibit together and we not surprised to read the computer printout at the end. Who was I most like among the New Englanders of the pre-war period? Sam Adams. I laughed when Don came out the spitting image of Ben Franklin, known for shmoozing on all sides of the issues, sewing seeds in favor of independence without warfare.

Who was I most like among the New Englanders of the pre-war period? Sam Adams. I laughed when Don came out the spitting image of Ben Franklin, known for schmoozing on all sides of the issues, planting seeds in favor of independence without warfare.
My story about Citizen Diplomacy in 1983-4 was more overtly revolutionary than Don’s. I struggled with wanting to play the traditional1950s role of supportive wife and the fire in my belly that called for direct action. This is the central struggle of the narrative, not the Target Seattle trip itself. Many of the original pages have hit the waste basket.

The reader of the final version of my story will resonate (or not) with the struggle we face today in a world lining up US adversaries on all sides against Trump’s American First agenda. Do we give up with the pessimistic view that nothing can be done? Disaster is inevitable. Or do we say it will all be fine while looking through our rose colored glasses?
Neither pessimism nor optimism are helpful. My story is about finding hope in an uncertain world, keeping on with no attachment to outcome. Action breeds hope.