I Never Travel Without My Diary
”I never travel without my diary,” wrote author, poet and playwright, Oscar Wilde, in The Importance of Being Earnest. “One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
This line, written for the strong and independent character of Gwendolyn Fairfax, reminds me of why I wrote the autobiography that was published this week, And Then What Happened: My Life from Zelda to Politics.
Over the last two plus years I had pulled together every note and memory I could find to try and capture the many phases, joys, changes, challenges and stories of my life. Each person I have met seems to remember different, singular, pieces of the picture. I came to see that telling the whole story was the only way to illustrate the way that every decade builds on the ones before, and the fact that every choice or setback, loss or gain, takes us down a new and different path.
Honestly, sometimes the little stories are the most fun! (like being introduced to Jack Kerouac on his way to the men’s room at Pandora’s Box in West Hollywood as his motorcycle buddy was trying to teach me to play the guitar).
So I present it to you and hope, if you choose to read it, you will enjoy every bit of the ride! And, also…
I’m not planning any events for discussion, purchase or signing, but I am available if any of you wants to gather and invite me to sign books, engage in conversation, or interviews about it–whether it’s about early tv, or women’s and/or lgbtq rights work, or politics–whatever you like and think your fans or your group might enjoy.
To schedule me for your gathering or interview, just email me at kuehl.website@gmail.com.
Here’s the book, along with sites to order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Bookshop.org (for independent bookstores).
/Order
Oh, What a Schmitt Show
This past week, like most, was filled with delightful images of the oval office squatter and his apologists doing a series of face-plants as they tried to resurrect old grievances and succeeded only in gathering more votes against all of their candidates.
My favorite, by far, occurred in the usually staid (but not under this regime) Senate Judiciary Committee.
Senator Eric Schmitt, a Republican from Missouri, received orders from the top to haul former special counsel, Jack Smith, in front of the committee for yet another grueling and insulting session. He apparently thought this kind of circus would divert the public’s attention away from economic meltdown, war in Iran, and every other scandal, failure and self-inflicted current catastrophe guaranteed to cost their party seats in the mid-term election.
It turned out to be a fiasco. Senator Schmitt and his embarrassed staff had spent weeks creating the kind of show and tell cardboard signs we used to use in junior high school. The whole point of the clumsily staged hearing was an attempt to catch Jack Smith in some kind of perjury related to the right-wing theory that he had made a secret trip to Georgia to improperly collude with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on their separate criminal cases against the white house destructor-in-chief for efforts to overturn the 2020 election and retention of classified documents.
Posing grandly, Schmitt ordered his lackeys to hold up some kind of chart displaying text messages from Smith’s security detail about seating arrangements at a basketball game. The chart was held high, then quickly pulled down as Schmitt asked Smith if he had gone to a game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on Feb. 3, 2024. Smith asked what city that might have been in. “Atlanta” answered Schmitt. Smith was visibly confused. No, he said, he hadn’t been in Atlanta during that time.
Pointing to the text messages, Schmitt called Smith a “dirtbag” and a few other choice words not usually heard in the Senate Judiciary hearings. He felt he had performed a big “gotcha”. And then Senator Amy Klobuchar had her turn. Asking the hapless aides to please hold up the big cardboard sign with text messages on it again, and this time for more than 2.3 seconds, she pointed out there was no mention of a game in Atlanta. Indeed, on further questioning, it turned out Smith had been at a women’s basketball game in Maryland in which, not the Atlanta Hawks (a men’s team) but the University of Iowa’s Hawkeyes, a college team made up of women, had been playing. Apparently women’s sports was not anywhere near Schmitt’s wheelhouse. Caitlin who?
Klobuchar was aware of the jaws of the trap she had just sprung on the clueless and now fully disgraced Schmitt. “Perhaps,” she said to him, “you should have looked at it more carefully. I think people should have their facts straight before they accuse people of being a ‘dirtbag’ and not get their facts wrong.” Indeed there was a picture of Smith at the women’s game, as well as texts showing row numbers such as those in the stadium where the women played and not rows beginning with letters, like the arena where the men played. (Sound of Schmitt going face down in the dirt). The expression on Republican Senator from Alabama Katie Britt’s face as she realized how the big lie had spectacularly collapsed was such a perfect cartoon of shock and dawning realization as to the mendacity of her side, the image went viral.
It was also fun to watch Sen. Klobuchar, the daughter of Minneapolis sportswriter, Jim Klobuchar, engage in a bit of womansplaining, as columnist Lorraine Ali put it in the LA Times, to Schmitt about the WNBA. It was, indeed, a total Schmitt Show.
