Cynthia Harrison

My yoga teacher is on another spiritual plane. He lives in a world where men and women can be just friends. He’s getting married next month, but he often talks about his very good female friends. This does not compute with me, as I have not had a real male friend since I was a…

Just finished reading Drop City, T. C. Boyle’s edgy take on the counterculture of the 1960s. Boyle’s narrative muscle brought back my freak days in glorious trippy color. Because I called myself a freak, not a hippie. Hippie was the establishments’ word for what we were, and they didn’t know shit. We called straight guys “the man”…

In April, I doubled my teaching load. Normally I would not give up my free time this way, but my husband works for Chrysler. Or should I start calling it Fiat? What I noticed most of all when I suddenly had to work all those extra hours is that when I did get a free minute,…

By the time I was thirty years old, I’d been married three times. My first husband was a musician. He was a sweet guy, but he wanted to be Jimi Hendrix, and I was just a waitress, trying to support us both on my tips from the Chinese restaurant. We were eighteen and in love.…

Something shocking in the current O: The Oprah Magazine beauty section this month: an older woman is considering dying her eyebrows at home. And the beauty editor actually encouraged her to do this, outlining what to me were scary precautions, like having two bottles of sterile eyewash on hand just in case. Maybe it’s only…