Larry Benjamin. Wordsmith. Writer. Author.

“ Ask them?” I whispered fiercely. “No! You ask.” Elvis practically whistled out of the side of his mouth. “But you brought it up—” “You agreed.” The vet, who was the sort of woman who’d drunk Brandy Alexanders in her youth, and then later in life, divorced and resettled, had adopted a pair of Lhasa Apso pups and named them Brandy and Alexander, cleared her throat. Now, she asked, “Is there something else?” Our dog, who just gotten a series of vaccinations trembled on the stainless steel table, her big brown eyes pleading for escape. She’d only been with us two weeks and didn’t fully trust us it seemed. At this moment, I can’t say I trusted us either. “Um…yes…can you look at her um…her privates?” “You mean her vulva?” The vet tech, young, blonde, perky with bright compassion, asked briskly. If not for her love of animals, she’d have been a stewardess: bubbly, unflappable, unmoored. “Yes!” She rolled our dog onto her back and we all peered at her...

Last Thursday, August 16, marked 11 years since we moved into our house. I have lived in this house longer than I have lived anywhere else since I left my parents’ home to attend Penn back when Ben Franklin was still on the faculty. The day we moved in, perhaps sensing I was home at last, I told my mother, who always wrote my addresses in pencil in her address book, to write this one in ink. I used to dream of buying Lucy Ricardo’s farm house in Connecticut. Later, I dreamed of buying the Brady Bunch split level. As a kid, I‘d spend hours pouring over the Sears catalog imagining the kitchen in which I’d install Avocado Green—or perhaps, Harvest Gold—appliances. In eleven years, we have battled contractors, mice, squirrels, termites, and floods. Yet, I feel safe—at home —here, in a place whose rooms are decisively painted—let’s face it, it takes commitment to paint rooms red or pea soup green or chartreuse—and hung with non-mass-produced art including local artist and goo...

It was my birthday. Actually, my birthday had been three weeks earlier, but Ivy, who was responsible for my birthday celebration, had forgotten, thus my actual birthday slipped by unnoticed. Until today, anyway. We would be going to lunch at 500 Below , she informed us—a chic new eatery which reached new heights on the Richter Scale of pretension and snobbery. Imagine the St Regis recast in black rubber, copperplate and plastic. They did not take reservations, but when you arrived for lunch at 11:45, the maître d’, would look down from his unreasonable height, over his glasses and down his beaked nose, and peck a message of unwelcome out of your flesh: “Unfortunately, there’ll be a wait of at least forty-five minutes. You can wait in the bar.” He would say this in a tone that was both haughty and mournful; he would say this despite the fact that you could see the restaurant was empty. The other thing about the restaurant was it was “calorie-wise”—every item on the menu wa...

ernest!, unrelenting in his criticism, and unwilling to bend, had accused the company of using money instead of true action to try and dissuade others from the veracity of his accusations. In response, Lizzy Borden started sponsoring all sorts of events combating discrimination of every stripe, sending an army of employees and leaders to parrot scripted messages of support and decrying white privilege while marching in lockstep, in flawlessly tailored suits, with Social Justice Warriors. Ted Talks, conferences galas and balls were financially supported indiscriminately and with equal zeal. This worked relatively well until Lizzie Borden ended up sponsoring a high-profile gala for an LGBTQ social justice organization, Community Advancement Coalition (CAC), nicknamed Caviar and Champagne for their penchant for throwing $1,000 per plate fundraisers. Having sponsored the gala, and purchasing a table for 10, she had discovered, to no one’s surprise but her own, that scraping the bar...