Check out today’s episode here:
Hi! I’m Michelle Kennedy and this is real quick. A short cast featuring an essay…well, almost every day. I did not record an episode Monday or Tuesday because I was traveling. My husband’s birthday was last week and we got to go down to New York City and see the Yankees play and stay at the famous Algonquin Hotel. Unfortunately, travel and excitement generally makes my lupus flare up – especially if there is heat or sun involved, so after any trip – or during one – I generally need a day or two to recover. So I took yesterday to recover. My hope had been to record this episode from the bathroom of our room in the famous Algonquin, but I wasn’t really up for it. Lupus can make your head fuzzy and the middle of a flare is generally, I’ve learned, not a good time to try and organize something new!
If you don’t know about the Algonquin, it is a gorgeous hotel on Manhattan that has been around since 1902. It was also, I found out, the first hotel in NYC to offer rooms to single women travelers. How modern! You know, I read stuff like that sometimes and I think what I’m supposed to think – what I was taught to think in high school – which is – oh – how modern. Good for them! But really, it’s more like WTF, isn’t?
I honestly, and I was born in 1972, cannot fathom not being able to go to another city and get myself a room because I’m a woman. That’s insane. But there it is. And thank you Dorothy Parker and all of you other female travelers for making that leap for us. But man. WTF?
Anyway in 1919, the Algonquin was where the infamous Round Table and The Vicious Circle began featuring Alexander Woolcott, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Ruth Hale, David Wallace and many others soon joined or visited the circle. The New Yorker – covers and cartoons of which haunt every corridor of the hotel – was conceived at the Round Table. My own rejection from them always stings a little more because I love that magazine so much.
I had an amazing time with my man at the hotel – and the game – my first Yankee game. More on that another time. The hotel was strange for me because I realized at first I was not overly impressed, but then I realized later it was because everything was everything I like and it felt so at home to me that maybe I didn’t need to be impressed. That was impressive. The Algonquin is art deco and New Yorker cartoons and books and comfy pillows and a cat. I love the elevator buttons and the door handles and the chandeliers and the rugs and the staff. If I could afford it and I was a single woman traveler, I would live there. In a second.
But alas I am back in beautiful Vermont. I encourage you to learn more about the history of the Algonquin Round Table and The Vicious Circle at algonquinroundtable.org
I am posting a few pictures of the Algonquin at my website mishkennedy.com so feel free to check them out or check them out on my insta which is at writer mish.
Today’s essay is about this last six months or so. I have been struggling a lot with my lupus combined with menopause and middle age in general – my purpose in life – you know, the normal stuff. And I found myself not just in the middle of a depression but in the middle of a real and true depression. I’m not sure I’m out of it. But being unmotivated is not something with which I was familiar. I am now.
Here’s my essay, Unmotivated. If you’d like to contribute an essay and read it here on Real Quick – please write me at writermisha1313@gmail.com or contact me through social media or my website mishkennedy.com.
