Live events that are fun to do with the kids

With kids and parents and adults alike being told to stay home, there's often something besides going for a walk in the woods that has to happen to make things tolerable. Here are some ideas:

• New England Aquarium Virtual Visits
• The Columbia Zoo has come cool live shows too.
• National Women's Museum has digital classroom resources and online exhibits
• Visit MoMA, the Anne Frank House, the Palace of Versailles and more on the Google Arts App
• Scholastic is offering learning at home.
• Free concerts! Make sure to check out offerings on Facebook live too!
• Minecraft has a coding education program for grades 3-5. Mystery Science has scienc lessons for K-5. 
• Yellowstone has a virtual tour. So does the Boston CHildren's Museum.
•  Frozen Actor Josh Gad reads online to kids every night on Twitter. Find the past ones here: https://www.ktnv.com/news/national/coronavirus/frozen-actor-josh-gad-reading-to-kids-on-twitter-to-provide-entertainment-during-outbreak.  For those who don't know, he's Olaf and was also in the live action Beauty and the Beast as Lefou.  His twitter account is @joshgad
• DJ Mel has kid friendly dance parties and DJ luis has parties too! 
• I have been to the Aquarium in Monterey and it's amazing. It has an otter cam up too!
• Check out the Great Wall of China.

So, if you're like me and a gym rat, it's also been really, really hard to get your steps in.  We have been walking in the woods a lot.  But a lot of companies are offering online streaming classes too.

• Planet Fitness has in home workouts once a  day usually at 7PM EST.
•  Beachbody brings you P90X and all those workouts 14 days for free.
• YouTube has a ton of workouts 
• DailyBurn too!

For Adults - in addition to the streaming services, these look fascinating:

•  Broadway * 

I'm sure I'm missing a lot - add in the comments!!  

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Review: Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow

I'm going to out myself right now - I have a huge celebrity crush on Ronan Farrow.  Even though he could easily have used his parents' money, he put himself through law school. He was a UNICEF spokesperson for women and children who were suffering in Darfur and he most recently, as a journalist, outed  Weinstein, Lauer and the practice of catching and killing stories.  This book is his memoir as to how he broke the Weinstein story while beginning at NBC and then, eventually, at the New Yorker Magazine.

I loved this book. It moved quickly and I devoured it in a way that I didn't devour She Said, a book I reviewed here about the same topic.  In large part, I think, Farrow narrates this as almost a spy novel where he's followed a lot, his sources go dark and his bosses at NBC stop him at every turn. The bite sized snippets that are chapters are helpful too.

The book does a masterful job capturing the feelings that Weinstein has (the sheer panic!) and his victims feel. It does a great job in describing the potential consequences people had in coming forward - Farrow himself got fired from NBC for pursuing this story. I loved learning about his process of reporting and what he had to do to ensure that he got things just so.  He was able to talk about all of the aspects of this story - personal impact, professional, victims, perpetrator - in a way that was balanced and informative without being too heavy handed. This is an important book to read as it memorializes a turning point in our culture insofar as power dynamics, sexual harassment and assault and the workplace go.

Definitely worth reading. 

Review: The Third Rainbow Girl by Emma Copley Eisenberg

OMG, so NPR has some of the BEST book recommendations. And this one was no exception. Generally speaking, this book is about the murder of two women who were hitchhiking to a music festival in West Virginia in 1980.  It's broad theme is about restless women and how society handles them. As a restless woman myself, how could I possibly resist.

The two women: Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero (who was from Long Island, NY - yet another connection), were hitchhiking from Arizona to West Virginia in 1980 for the Rainbow Gathering, a hippie-type peace and music festival that was being held in the woods and mountains in West Virginia (I had no desire to go W.V. before this book, but now I totally want to go!). Their bodies were found in an isolated clearing in Pocahontas County, near the festival. The women had been shot, but there were no signs of other assault or sexual assault.

Rumors flew around. Everyone had a theory about who did it but generally, everyone seemed to agree that the people that committed these acts were locals, based upon where the bodies were located. One local farmer in particular, Jacob Beard, was arrested and tried because he was a mean drunk in particular. He was later acquitted when a notorious serial killer confessed to the killings (it was actually the same guy that shot Larry Flynt of Hustler fame!). Because he was already on death row, there was never any trial for him on the Rainbow murders.

I loved this book. Eisenberg was as close as you can get to being a native without actually being a native having educated young women in the area on and off for years. This gave her a level of access generally reserved for insiders. She takes on things like the "missing white girl" syndrome and the scary hick myth popularized by movies and books like Deliverance. I loved learning about Eisenberg's own story about working in West Virginia as well and she managed to weave that into the narrative of the two murdered women seamlessly. She weaves the narrative of how women want to travel to learn about themselves into the true crime story of two women who sadly lost their own lives.

So good.  Go get it NOW!