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Table of Contents

• ↓ From the archives (September 12, 2006): Under the Ghostbuster Sky
• ↓ From the archives (October 18, 2002): the first post on my blog
• ↓ Today, the Sheila Variations turns 24
• ↓ Off Campus, episode 4: Moonlight in a chamber
• ↓ From the archives (2011): Wisconsin Idyll in Funny Hats with Rocket Launchers
• ↓ From the archives (2004): I Was Told I Would Get Wings
• ↓ Top Alternatives to sheilaomalley.com

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"Michael and I sat up on my roof for a couple of hours on the late afternoon-early evening of Sept. 10. The sky was what I call a “Ghostbusters sky”: smudgy, charcoal grey, heavy and low, dramatic. Smudgy almost-black clouds overlapping each other, pressing up against each other. The buildings of our fragile beautiful skyline came out in stark relief against that black sky. Occasionally, a stray red gleam of sunset would break out from behind the clouds to the west (behind us), and then, suddenly, the buildings of Manhattan would GLOW. But only for a moment. The spire of the Empire State Building would blaze into a golden-white paper cut-out, the Chrysler Building beaming, and then, as the clouds closed up again, the gleam would subside, back to the shadowy building shapes of late afternoon."

"We were surrounded by butterflies. Big orange butterflies, soaring in the wind, not even having to flap their wings, just taking off, hang-gliding, but then flap flap flap flap pumping it up a notch, chasing each other. At one point Michael and I literally had two orange butterflies hovering over our heads. Were they like the little angel and devil who sit on your shoulder at the same time, whispering contradictory demands? At first we thought there was only ONE butterfly, we kept seeing him, and he certainly seemed to get around: first he was here, now there. Then we realized there was a whole PHALANX of them. Not really watching over us, no, they were too self-absorbed for that (and who can blame them? Have you ever heard of an altruistic butterfly?) … but it did seem like they hovered around our heads protectively. Taking shifts. “Okay … you go off and hang-glide for a while … I got these two … no, no, you go … have fun! I got this.”"

"We had been walking around all day. Breakfast at a diner in Hoboken (we HAD to go to a diner, for old times’ sake). We talked our heads off (jazzed on caffeine), then we walked around Hoboken for a couple hours. We went into the second-hand bookstore. We talked. Michael so enjoyed the overcast sky and the cool wind, coming, as he does, from living in LA. He had been so excited that the forecast was “overcast”. We went to Barnes and Noble. There were a couple of hysterical moments involving a certain Pulitzer Prize winning author with whom I have a checkered past, which Michael knows about. Michael, looking at the book, said, bluntly, “I will NEVER buy this book.” So protective."

"After that we walked to Frank Sinatra Park, near the spot where I watched the buildings fall and the air filled with screams, and sat on the low wall for an hour or so, the Hudson slate-grey and choppy, the buildings of Manhattan in shadow, the clouds marching down from the north, heavy and low and portentous. The skyline doesn’t look right. It never will. There is a hole in the ground but more haunting is the hole in the sky."

Key Topics & Focus Areas for sheilaomalley.com:

From the archives (September 12, 2006): Under the Ghostbuster Sky

From the archives (October 18, 2002): the first post on my blog

Today, the Sheila Variations turns 24

Off Campus, episode 4: Moonlight in a chamber

From the archives (2011): Wisconsin Idyll in Funny Hats with Rocket Launchers

From the archives (2004): I Was Told I Would Get Wings