A View from the Back Bay

My name is Skip Pile, living in Boston and Nantucket Island and generally watching closely from a distance.

An American Daughter. “The past is always a rebuke to the present.”        - Robert Penn Warren In this, the first January week of a new Administration, we have felt already the thrill of emancipation from sins of our fathers.  But, we have also seen certain discouraging examples of the lessons of history ignored. In the Spring of 1997, Mary Jane and I attended the Broadway premiere of “An American Daughter”, written by one of MJ’s oldest and dearest friends, Wendy Wasserstein.  The play was neither her most famous or nor critically successful.  But, for me, (perhaps because I had the privilege of just beginning to know her), it was my favorite. Tragically, Wendy passed away at the height of her career at the age of 55—-three years ago this week. Set in Washington D.C., Lyssa Dent Hughes, the title character is a brilliant doctor, loving wife and mother and scintillating Georgetown hostess who, at the play’s beginning, seems poised to take on the additional, immense duties of the Surgeon General of the United States just after the Inauguration of a new Administration.  Her nomination publicly and ignominiously collapses because of her failure to report to Jury Duty a year earlier. “An American Daughter” was, of course, inspired by the collapse of Zoe Baird’s nomination for attorney general by Bill Clinton in February, 1993 because she had failed to pay Social Security taxes for her nanny—-an excruciating 29-day fiasco that embarrassed and demeaned everyone. What is it about these lessons that we haven’t learned?  What are the real reasons Caroline Kennedy confounds us all by entering, withdrawing, re-entering and ultimately-re-withdrawing from consideration for the New York Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton?  Why is it going to be just fine that President Obama’s (male) nominee for Secretary of the Treasury “neglected” to pay his own Social Security taxes for four years? Let’s just all try to continue to embrace, not ignore our American lessons from history. 

An American Daughter.

“The past is always a rebuke to the present.”

       - Robert Penn Warren

In this, the first January week of a new Administration, we have felt already the thrill of emancipation from sins of our fathers.  But, we have also seen certain discouraging examples of the lessons of history ignored.

In the Spring of 1997, Mary Jane and I attended the Broadway premiere of “An American Daughter”, written by one of MJ’s oldest and dearest friends, Wendy Wasserstein.  The play was neither her most famous or nor critically successful.  But, for me, (perhaps because I had the privilege of just beginning to know her), it was my favorite. Tragically, Wendy passed away at the height of her career at the age of 55—-three years ago this week.

Set in Washington D.C., Lyssa Dent Hughes, the title character is a brilliant doctor, loving wife and mother and scintillating Georgetown hostess who, at the play’s beginning, seems poised to take on the additional, immense duties of the Surgeon General of the United States just after the Inauguration of a new Administration.  Her nomination publicly and ignominiously collapses because of her failure to report to Jury Duty a year earlier.

“An American Daughter” was, of course, inspired by the collapse of Zoe Baird’s nomination for attorney general by Bill Clinton in February, 1993 because she had failed to pay Social Security taxes for her nanny—-an excruciating 29-day fiasco that embarrassed and demeaned everyone.

What is it about these lessons that we haven’t learned?  What are the real reasons Caroline Kennedy confounds us all by entering, withdrawing, re-entering and ultimately-re-withdrawing from consideration for the New York Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton?  Why is it going to be just fine that President Obama’s (male) nominee for Secretary of the Treasury “neglected” to pay his own Social Security taxes for four years?

Let’s just all try to continue to embrace, not ignore our American lessons from history. 

3 years ago