Award-winning columnist, photographer and news writer Ellen Leahy is back as the editor of the Skaneateles Press, in beautiful Skaneateles New York.
She is the former editor of the Skaneateles Press and the Marcellus Observer, and most recently the Syracuse City Eagle. She makes her home in Skaneateles where she is also a freelance photographer and caregiver for her parents, Bill and Marion Leahy.
She began her formal writing career as a columnist with one of her hometown papers, The Duxbury Clipper, in Duxbury, MASS. Born in California, she then moved to Sea Girt, NJ. She is a product of small town America - and the late great American Middle Class.
The photo at right is the drive down to Brook Farm off of West Lake Road - one of my former Skaneateles haunts.
Currently reading...
CLEAN, as well as other assorted reads on my dad's Kindle.
Without trying or the advantage of cable TV, I did periodically witness Farrah Fawcett’s last couple of months. I couldn’t help but recall it was more traditional for Hollywood’s iconic women of old, to put themselves out of the public spotlight as their beauty faded - even hiding away. Of course, Farrah’s beauty wasn’t gone, as it very much came from within. But still the drama of her deathbed?
What was she thinking?
And then, listening to her doctor after her death, I got it. She put her cancer and it’s caustic effects right out there in public view for a purpose...
I blew my share of grass and dropped the random window pane, orange barrel or hit of mescaline back in the day. But when it came to painkillers I shied away. I even avoided aspirin as a young person. Who me? Pain? The high didn’t look so attractive from the outside. But also, there were plenty of people imbibing – stumbling and groggy.
Years later after a freak accident, it really struck me that when I actually needed some heavy duty painkillers, “how miraculously these products worked.”
I’m talking searing pain, combined with dull aching and the occasional sharp pain. Take the painkillers; pain went away. So did making sense, but at that point who cared? Nothing else mattered except stopping the pain, as that was my world...
It wasn’t like they picked us up by the back of our waistbands and threw us out, but I was once ejected from John “Cougar” Mellencamp’s dressing room in the War Memorial.
Let me back up and say there are two kinds of girls in this world – those that are groupies and those that are not. I am in the latter category. Non-groupies shy away from celebrities, do not like to call attention to themselves in public (writing doesn’t count cause you can’t see me), do not often dress in an overly (keyword) provocative manner and judge men on who they are as a person, not what they do for play or a living.
It all started with our friend’s husband who was an assistant DA at the time and also worked security at War Memorial Concerts...
Is gang violence just inherent in American Culture? I mean, you know the Puritans hanging people for religious reasons after fleeing their homeland because of religious torment, witch hunts, the Wild West, the lynch mobs, Hollywood’s interpretation of the Gangs of New York - and who could forget the Mafia?
Even I, who was raised in some of the best of America’s small towns from coast to coast, can relate to the gang mentality.
It is intoxicating to find a group that can appreciate your skill set, which might perhaps not be academics (It’s not for a lack of smarts, rather interest in formal learning).
At a certain time in one’s life, it is almost refreshing to find a group that honors disobedience. A group that supports the individual...
Johnny Rohde on sax with Larry Luttinger - hot, hot!
Oh dear, not to take away from any of the gentleman on Y94 FM’s list of Hunks of CNY – five over 50 and five under 50 years, but seriously there are so many men missing from this valuable list.
I mean why wasn’t my boyfriend nominated? He’s a ruggedly handsome apple grower, whose work ethic and intimate knowledge of Mother Nature area truly amazing...
