Follow Friday: GLEEfully yours

I had a bunch of ideas floating in my head for this week's Follow Friday. Summer is coming. There are all kinds of events for the long three day weekend: new movies, concerts, adventures to plan. This week, however, I re-ignited my interest in a TV show that had lost me way back in October.

When Glee first came on the scene, I loved it. It appealed to all of the things I love in entertainment: snarky dialogue, creativity, and just enough eye candy (have you seen Matthew Morrison? YUM!). Having served out my high school days in the show choir, I could definitely relate to some of the plot points although I don't remember bursting into song in the middle of the cafeteria or even getting slushied.

So the first season of GLEE was fun but it was also inspiring. Watching the GLEEKS handle poignant issues such as Kurt's coming out or Quinn's pregnancy or Rachel's discovery of her birth mother was, to me, the main attraction. The entertainment provided by spontaneous songs ranging from Ice, Ice Baby to Lady's Gaga's Telephone was the icing on the cake.

Then came season 2 and the plot quickly fizzled. By the second episode, I was frustrated that the songs were becoming the main attraction and storyline seemed to be an afterthought. I'm not a fan of the over-produced, auto-tuned song style that became de rigeur on the show so I stopped watching.

Of course, I'm still hip to all that is pop and thanks to social media, it was pretty easy to keep up with GLEE's plot points by listening to my Facebook friends discuss the most recent episodes. It seems that the show may have finally found its storyline again, thanks in large part to the funeral for Sue's sister. This has brought the topic of intellectual disability to the forefront and given new opportunities to the actress who plays Becky, the new captain of the Cheerios. Who also happens to have an intellectual disability.

This week was the GLEE season finale. I admit that I have not yet watched the finale but I need to. My favorite musical in recent memory, Wicked, was featured in the NYC plotline but my favorite GLEE surprise of the week was this PSA:

Thank you, GLEE, for continuing to support those with differences. Thank you for recognizing that the world is a better place because we are not all exactly the same. Thank you for giving one of my biggest pet peeves a national audience. Maybe I'll use my summer to catch up before Season 3. You've won me back.

The Edge of Seventeen

It's that time of year when the blog musings center on my grief journey. Every year, it seems like we are busy with end-of-the-year school activities and the start of summer, planning vacations, and then (kablam)...it's almost July 9. Grief is funny. Grief is weird. I remember very early after Charlotte died, I watched the movie Rabbit Hole. There's an amazingly poignant scene where Nicole Kidman's character is talking with another woman who lost a child over 10 years before (played by Dianne Wiest). She talks about grief being like a brick in your pocket. It never goes away. Sometimes you can even forget it's there. But it comes back and makes its presence known from time to time. And (she says) "it's what you have of them." I probably did not fully realize then what a powerful and true analogy that is. As time goes on, our grief changes. Yet, it is always there on the edge of things. It sits in that pocket and sometimes makes itself known. This...

To everything there is a season

It's been a while since I used the blog to share my thoughts. What started as some random musings turned into much more than a Facebook post. I started writing this over a week ago but it's taken a minute to actually hit the publish button. Thanks for your patience. Welcome back. It has been a week (or two) . One of those weeks where everything happens all at once. A week where things need to happen in a particular order or everything‘s going to go to shit. A week where you just seem to go from one thing to the next thing and you’ll figure out what’s going to happen next as it goes along. A week full of work and family and rest and sleeplessness and it never feels like there’s enough time for anything. But somehow it all works out. A plaque on the library walk in NYC My week started with a trip for work to NYC. It coincided with my birthday. Because of that, I had all kinds of feelings all week about life in general. The week ended with a trip to Florida that, unfortun...

Bittersweet Sixteen

I think about Charlotte every single day. However, this time of year, I'm flooded with all kinds of memories as we commemorate the anniversary of her birth. This year feels like a bit of a milestone. Sixteen. If cancer had not taken her life back in 2010, I have a feeling I would be planning a massive birthday celebration this year. 16 always feels like a landmark year in someone's life. I have been thinking a great deal about the last birthday party we had for Charlotte in 2009. We didn't know it at the time, but we were halfway through her treatment journey. We had been through three major brain surgeries and a few rounds of inpatient chemotherapy. Treatments were not going well. In fact, right after her birthday, we would make the trip to Houston, Texas where we would settle in for about 10 weeks of proton beam radiation treatments and a new customized chemotherapy protocol. This was the unspoken "last chance option" to beat that aggressive brain tumor into ...

I See What You Meme

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