That title, as all Sondheim fans know, comes from the title of a song in "A Little Night Music," in which the song's lyrics offer praise undermined with wry commentary on the reasons for offering it. But that's not my purpose today. I write this to offer genuine praise for women, and specifically for three women, two of whom have had a profound effect in my life, and one who had a profound effect on the lives of all of us.
That may not, in and of itself, sound overly political. But THR has never been strictly about politics, and especially not when it's appropriate for me to comment on the passing of someone who has had a major, special impact on my life, whether a public figure like Sondheim, or a private one like my mother. Besides, historically, and up through the moments in which I'm typing this, to be a woman has been to be the relentless focus of all forms of politics. And, right now, after more than sixty years in which women thought that they were making progress on leveling the gender playing field, they are finding themselves the subject and the object of political oppression. Which makes it all the more important to tell the stories of women, and the impact that they have had in our lives. And this burden should fall all the more heavily on men, who have for far too long had an interest in suppressing those stories.
And I'm happy to do my part. So here we go.
The first woman is Melissa Borgerding, a new playwright with whom I'm working to produce a wonderful play she wrote, "Someone Close To You." As I mentioned in closing out my blog for last year, I've formed a production company dedicated to producing the work of those whose voices are not heard often enough, culturally and otherwise. I've selected Melissa's play as my first project and, last month, we had two readings of the play at Theatre West in Los Angeles, and both audiences responded enthusiastically to it. As a result, we are now in the process of planning for a limited run of SCTY at a theater in Los Angeles, which will (if it happens) take place sometime this fall.
Like a lot of American dramas, Melissa's play is a family drama, one that depicts a couple in the middle of two challenges: a pregnancy, and caring for a parent in declining health. How they meet those challenges is something that I believe will challenge audiences. In fact, when I first read the script, I found the ending to be at least a little bit challenging. But, far more importantly, I found it to be real, poignant, and thought-provoking. In other words, exactly the sort of theater that matters the most to me. That's why I was not surprised by the success of our readings. Not completely, anyway.
I told Melissa that, no matter how well a script reads, you never know whether a script can become a play until it's up on its feet on stage. But I had a good feeling about this one, based on decades of reading, seeing, and acting in plays, and our experience at Theater West validated that feeling. In addition to being a talented writer, Melissa is a terrific collaborator, who has responded very well to feedback from our director, James A. Goins, and me. Both of us look forward to working with her on the next stage (no pun intended) for this project.
Now, unfortunately, for a far sadder tribute.
In a former life, I worked for three years in New York City as a claims representative for the Social Security Administration, taking and approving or disapproving claims for Social Security benefits. I tremendously enjoyed living in New York, and enjoyed (for the most part) the people I interviewed as well as the people I worked with. But the system itself was and probably still is the most complicated system of legislation and regulation in our Federal system. Even worse, in fact, than the laws and regulations of the Internal Revenue Service, with which I've also worked in my legal career.
And, when I say I got along with my colleagues, that was not always the case when it came with the ones in management. In fact, when the Republicans came into national power, those latter relationships got worse, as all of us came under greater pressure to deny claims and otherwise find ways to cut benefits. This was my first career-type of position, and I was not prepared to deal with any of the stresses my job created, especially the Reagan-related stresses.
Fortunately, throughout all of this, I had one person I could turn to.
Her name was Julia Brandner.
Like me, she was a claims representative, although she had been working long enough (unlike me) to no longer have conditional status, as my employment did. Accordingly, she had a considerable amount of experience with both the technical knowledge of the work, as well as the politics of the office. More importantly, we shared an affinity for the arts and show business, although her tastes ran more to television, and "Peter Gunn" in particular, than to Broadway (or, even worse for her, science fiction). But, more importantly than anything else for me at that point, she was a kind and generous person, one who always organized office lunches at restaurants near our office, and who was always willing to listen when I had problems either with cases, or my immediate supervisor for most of my time there. The less said about him, the better, except I understand that, when he left SSA, he worked for a bill collector, and one could not possibly imagine a better match between employer and employee than that one.
What astonished me about her friendship was the fact that it extended for so very long a time after I left New York in 1982. Up until September of 2020, each year without fail, I would get both a birthday and Christmas greeting from her. Thanks in no small part of this faithfulness on her part, I was able to keep up to date on what was going on with many of my former colleagues, and to be invited to her retirement party in 1999, which gave me the opportunity to see her and my colleagues one last time. Her kindness and generosity at every step of the past four decades has meant more than I can say, both personally and professionally.
Julia, no one has a greater right to be called my friend than you did, and always will. Baruch dayan ha'emess.
Finally, one more sad tribute for someone who added immeasurably to all of our lives. If you are an American, and regardless of your sexual identification, you owe her gratitude, although she has not been a household name for decades.
Her name was Patricia Schroeder. She was a congresswoman from Colorado, at a time when the House of Representatives was an almost entirely white, male political preserve. That is has moved some distance away from that status, albeit not completely, is due in no small measure to the rare combination of perseverance and progressivism that she brought every day to her career in the House.
I have taken the liberty here of reprinting the following, from Daily Kos. It is well worth your time to read it.
Former Colorado Rep. Pat Schroeder, a Democrat who was one of the most prominent voices for women’s rights in Congress during her service from 1973 to 1997, died Monday at the age of 82. Schroeder, who was just one of just 14 women in the House when she first arrived, was instrumental in passing legislation like the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act and Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. However, she acknowledged how much work still needed to be done in the title of her 1998 memoir, “24 Years of House Work … and the Place Is Still a Mess.”
Schroeder, who got her piloting license as a teenager, was one of only 15 women in her 1964 class of more than 500 at Harvard Law School. She recounted that, after the dean had told the small group, “Do you realize you have taken this position from a man?” another woman responded, “Well, I am only here because I could not get in at Yale.” Schroeder and her husband relocated to Denver after they both graduated, and at first it looked like Jim Schroeder would be the one who would have a political career.
In 1970 he campaigned for a seat in the state House and lost the general election by fewer than 50 votes. Pat Schroeder would recount decades later that legislators responded to that close call by drawing up a gerrymander that specifically placed their home in a new seat, boundaries that “didn't make any sense, except that's where Schroeder lived.” The future congresswoman, though, wrote in 1998, “But the law of unintended consequences bit the gerrymanderers―they kept Jim from running but they launched my political career!”
It was another 1970 election that would set in motion a chain of events that would help propel her to Congress two years later. Democratic Rep. Byron Rogers narrowly lost renomination after 10 terms to Craig Barnes, who emphasized his own opposition to the Vietnam War, but angry Rogers backers refused to support Barnes in the general election. That left an opening for Denver District Attorney Mike McKevitt, a Republican who had made headlines for shutting down screenings of the erotic film “I Am Curious (Yellow)” and who crusaded against restaurants with large hippie clienteles. McKevitt ended up winning the 1st Congressional District 52-45, which made him Denver’s first Republican House member in a quarter century.
Schroeder recounted that the original favorite for the Democratic nomination for 1972 was state Sen. Arch Decker, but her husband was one of many who wanted an alternative to someone they saw as “an elephant in donkey's clothing.” That proved to be a tough task, though, as few wanted to campaign in a year where they expected presidential nominee George McGovern to tank their chances. Schroeder, who taught law and had worked for the National Labor Relations Board, was therefore taken aback when Jim Schroeder relayed the news that local Democrats had mentioned her as a candidate.
She described her first reaction as, “Don't tease me, I'm tired. Why should I be the designated kamikaze?” Jim Schroeder agreed that she stood no chance of beating McKevitt and likely wouldn’t even be the nominee, but she wrote that he continued, “But if you don't get in the race and articulate the issues, they will not be discussed. You think the government's policies about Vietnam and the environment are wrongheaded, and you're always urging your students to get involved.”
While Schroeder, who was still left “wonder[ing] what they served at this meeting,” still needed persuasion, she agreed to be “Dona Quixote” in a hopeless race: She’d remember, to her frustration, a newspaper summing up her announcement with the headline “Denver housewife runs for Congress.”
Schroeder had to quickly organize a campaign to beat Decker, who remained the favorite of the party establishment. She remembered that at the important state party convention she was granted only 30 seconds to speak by leaders who wanted to “muzzle me with their fast clock.” She used her limited time to declare her support for Cesar Chavez’s lettuce boycott, an issue that resounded “with the “large Chicano population of the city” and helped her win the convention.
Schroeder went on to beat Decker 55-45, and he did not respond well to that shock defeat. “He went into a massive pout,” Schroeder wrote in her 1998 book, “literally pulling down the blinds in his house and refusing to speak to the press.” But despite that upset win, she had an even tougher six-week battle ahead of her against McKevitt, “who thought he was going to waltz through a non-campaign to victory.”
The incumbent wasn’t the only one: Schroeder in a 2015 oral history interview with the House’s Office of the Historian said that the DCCC told her, “Well, we really have nothing to say to you; we can’t waste our money.” The Democrat, who ran on the slogan, “She wins, we win,” decided to wage an anti-war campaign that also emphasized her support for the children of migrant families and opposition to Denver hosting the 1976 Winter Olympics. (Colorado voters that fall would decisively back a referendum to withhold funding for the event, which ended up relocating to Austria.)
Schroeder believed that, because establishment leaders didn’t help her, she benefited from running a nontraditional campaign that “seemed to penetrate the normal clutter and noise of politics.” She also said that Barnes, two years after his loss, transferred his “energized grassroots group to me.”
McKevitt, who demeaned his opponent as “Little Patsy,” continued to ignore Schroeder’s campaign, but the FBI didn’t. Schroeder said that her home was broken into “a couple of times” without anything obviously being stolen, but she didn’t think much of it at the time. She would learn a few years later, though, that the FBI suspected her slogan meant she was a communist, and that her husband’s barber was one of their informants. (“In hindsight it did seem rather odd how often he would show up in the middle of dinner,” she’d write.)
Schroeder ended up shocking everyone, including herself, by unseating McKevitt 52-47, a victory that made her the first woman to represent Colorado in Congress. That win came at the same time that, according to analyst Kiernan Park-Egan, President Richard Nixon was beating McGovern 55-45 in the district.
Schroeder soon found herself in the “guy gulag” that was D.C., and she immediately faced a hostile reception from a prominent Democrat after she became the first woman to ever serve on the House Armed Services Committee. Chairman Edward Hébert, a longtime supporter of segregation, made Schroeder share a seat with Black colleague Ron Dellums, with her remembering him saying, “The two of you are only worth half the normal member.” (It’s disputed whether he actually uttered those words.)
Schroeder, though, went on to become an influential member, and she quickly became entrenched at home. The congresswoman turned back state Rep. Frank Southworth 58-41 during the Democratic landslide of 1974, and she went on to beat another state representative, Don Friedman, 53-46 as Jimmy Carter was pulling off a tiny win in her constituency. This would be the last time Schroeder would fall below 59%: In 1982 she even fended off her old foe Decker, who had joined the GOP, 60-37. During the Reagan era, Schroeder also became known for dubbing the commander in chief the “Teflon president,” a label that ironically stuck.
Schroeder briefly formed a presidential exploratory committee in 1987 after former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart dropped out, but she failed to raise enough money. The congresswoman announced her decision to stay out of the race in a press conference where she fought back tears, something that drew scorn from several feminist leaders who argued she’d badly damaged the presidential hopes of future women. Schroeder later said, “I think it’s amazing that no one ever said that Joe Biden had ruined the future of men forever because people would think that they all plagiarized or that Gary Hart ruined the future of men forever because they all played around.”
Schroeder decided to retire the cycle after the 1994 Republican wave left her in the minority for the first time, and she went on to spend 11 years leading the Association of American Publishers. During her final month in the House she responded to a Los Angeles Times’ question about what advice she’d give women arriving in Congress, “I think women still should never kid themselves that they’re going to come here and be part of the team. And you ought to come here with a very clear definition of what it is you want to do, and that you will not be deterred.”
What an amazing combination of courage and cleverness she possessed! The Democratic Party could use candidates with that same combination now more than ever! Truly, all that I can add to the above is that now, more than ever, today's Democratic Party needs to run everywhere across the county, to find ways to communicate its progressive message in places where it may not be easy to do so. It will entail risks.
But, with a nation on the edge of civil war, it has never been more necessary. My generation is particular has been able to grow up in an age of leisure, one that kindled indolence at the same time it inspired idealism. We have generations ready to come after us, eager to build on the progress that has been made, and yet we have allowed our indolence to squander our idealism. Shaking off the former to embrace the latter will entail facing risks greater than the ones Congresswoman Schroeder faced. But, if she were still here with us, no one would insist harder that we face those risks without fear, without favor, without pause, and without pity for those who would be happy to reduce the words "freedom" and "democracy" to labels to be slapped on the face of their proposed tyranny. Her example will always live with us. Let us embrace it, build on it, and find true American greatest in the place where it has always lain. In each other.
Three stories of three remarkable women. All of whom deserve our praise and respect. Let their stories be told again and again. And let many other similar ones be added to them.
