Month: April 2020

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2020 – 2021 Fresh Start Scholarships

The Fresh Start Scholarship Foundation, Inc. is pleased to announce the continuation of the Fresh Start Scholarship. Our scholarship is specifically designed for women who have interrupted their education for various reasons and now seek to return to school to better their status and their opportunities. We award annual scholarships based on need and provide mentoring support. Candidates must be enrolled in a two- or four-year degree program at an accredited Delaware college or university. Since its inception in 1996, the foundation has awarded over $1.1 million in scholarships to more than 250 women who have been given the opportunity to achieve their goals. Each of these recipients is unique – her goals, her skills, her dreams.

The Fresh Start Scholarship Foundation has over $100,000 in funds available to award scholarships to deserving women in financial need for academic year 2020-2021. There are scholarship funds available to students in ALL majors. We ask that candidates be recommended by a social service/government agency, a college/ university, or an employer. The Fresh Start Scholarship Foundation, Inc. Board of Directors, based upon the applications received, will make all decisions regarding the recipients and the amounts of the awards.

The application is now available online at www.freshstartscholarship.org.

Please share the attached fact sheet to help us solicit candidates as soon as possible. PLEASE NOTE: Applications for the 2020-2021 academic year must be submitted by May 15, 2020. All applicants will be notified on or before July 31, 2020.

For questions concerning the Fresh Start Scholarship, please send an email to FSSF@freshstartscholarship.org  or call 302-397-3440. Through this scholarship we aim to make a difference and contribute in a meaningful way to an improvement in lifestyle for deserving women. Thank you for your assistance in sharing the application information with qualified candidates.

Fresh Start Scholarship Foundation, Inc.

P.O. Box 7784 | Wilmington, DE 19803

302.397.3440 | FSSF@freshstartscholarship.org

www.FreshStartScholarship.org

One of the things I am doing during the shut-down is tutoring virtually. I tutor writing, as you might expect.

Today I was sent a paper to look over for a student in the Abnormal Psych. class. The student is a woman, and she wrote a paper arguing that Miley Cyrus is mentally ill.

NOTES ON MY FITNESS FOR EDITING THIS ASSIGNMENT:

#1. I know nothing about Miley Cyrus.

#2. I took this class at the college myself, and everyone has to write a dumb paper arguing that a famous person is mentally ill. My paper argued that Donald Trump is mentally ill.

My paper was, of course, brilliant.

LOL. No, I have no idea if it was brilliant or not. The point of the paper is to show an understanding, at the kindergarten level, of the ideas of abnormal behavior.

#3. Not the best paper for me to help with because I personally think very few behaviors are abnormal. AND I’m mostly supposed to check their APA formatting… real boring shit.

But here is what the student said makes Cyrus “abnormal”:

#1. She used to wear pink; now she wears black.

#2. She now dresses sexy.

#3. She uses black eye-liner.

#4. She gave up country music and Disney.

#5. She used to dress like her dad wanted her too; now she dresses like she wants to.

Okay, at this point my eyes are popping out of my head.

Fellow feminists, grand dames Gloria, Jane, the grandmas of the mothers of these girls, and the mothers of the girls, WTF?

How does this happen?

How do we allow ourselves to be erased from our own choices in this way? This young woman never assumes that Cyrus wanted to change, needed to change, is allowed to change, no. She is not dressing like her daddy wants. She gave up pink, for goodness sake! The horror! The horror!

How do we allow ourselves to judge each other like this?

I get how we all feel like we own our favorite celebrities, and we don’t want them to change, but how do we come to a place where young college women think not wearing pink is abnormal?

And I get that country music, like folk music, is about the day-to-day living of people in rural areas. HOWEVER, it should scare us all that their day-to-day living is misogynistic, and Christian-centric (also misogynistic. sorry Christians, but it is true), finding-a-guy-with-a-truck-to-love-me-centric, and patriotic to the point where even questioning whether America is doing the right thing is seen as treasonous, amoral, and insane.

Yaaaa!

Good to have that off my chest.

I am ill-suited to my job. This is very true. Because while I am a fantastic editor (I can spot the tiniest of plot holes), I cannot stop myself from telling a student that not liking pink is not a sign of mental illness. Fuck pink.

When I was in 9th grade I bought my first records (yes, my mother was against records, so I was not allowed to buy any before then) at Sears, lol, and I bought one LP (London Town, by Wings), and the following 45s:
All Alone (Rita Cooledge)
Give a Little Bit (Supertamp)
Tired of Towing the Line (Rocky Burnett)
On and On (Stephen Bishop)
Telephone Line (ELO)
& Lovely Day (Bill Withers)

For the next 5 days, Mosquitoes and Men for Kindle is on us (us being my company, Devil’s Party Press)!

Free Kindle version!

We are so grateful that you read our books and support our authors that we want to get a book to you, without you having to touch anything that anyone else has touched, for free!

We hope you feel well, we hope you feel loved, and we hope you enjoy this Southern drama as much as we did. Hopefully, by the time it is as hot outside as it is in this book, we’ll all be outside too!

Love Di (and Dave too!)

PS. Amazon only lets us give the book away for free for 5 days, meaning this opportunity ends on 4/10, so get yours today!

John Prine has Covid19 and is critical. Sending him love, hope you will join me.

It’s funny, people who only know me now may not know, but in the 70s, I was a Philly WIOQ listener (Adult Rock Era: Under Outlet, WIOQ evolved into an eclectic music format often described as “adult rock“. The station played a blend of softer songs heard on rock music stations, some deeper album cuts, a few top 40 crossover hits, and a bit of uptempo jazz. Leading air personalities on WIOQ in this era included John Harvey (“Harvey in the Morning”), Helen Leicht who hosted a show called “Breakfast With The Beatles” on Sunday mornings, David Dye, Ed Sciaky and Michael Tozzi. (Leicht and Dye are now the midday DJs for the adult alternative public station WXPN. The former continues her “Leight Lunch” program at noon, and Dye is the producer and host of the nationally distributed World Cafe.)Thank you Wikipedia….

I have fairly varied tastes; I love “old school” jazz; I love funk, some rap, some very pop/teeny-bopper stuff, and I might make this list of my current favorite bands (in no particular order):

• Cake
• Fountains of Wayne
• Jack Johnson
• Beatles
• Stones
• Kinks
• Chili Peppers
• Luna
• Sugar Ray…

But I think most folks in my life today wouldn’t associate me with a very folky sort of past. Loved me some deep cut Jackson Browne, Bonnie Rait, Joan Armatrading, CSN, Neil Young. Love them still, just kinda wore them out a little, and life takes you in different ways. If I were still with my first love, I’d still be right in that folky-rocky pocket. But love doesn’t stay; tastes change, and we don’t last forever, or even as long as we should, in some cases.

So sorry that we lost Adam Schlesinger, formerly of Fountains of Wayne (FOW), to Covid19. I adore FOW, and am so very sorry to know there will never be a reunion concert now. He was too young to leave us. I hope that John Prine will not soon join him.

I love your songs, John, and I wish you recovery, music, and love.

PS. Check out my previous John Prine post why don’t you?

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