SKIING THROUGH SOUR CREAM

SALSA WITH DEATH

Is an older woman who travels alone to a foreign country brave and independent ... or is she nuts? Come with me to Mexico, swim with me through some pretty scary underground caves, dance with me on Día de Muertos and tell me what you think.

SKIING THROUGH SOUR CREAM

How and where did most Jews learn to ski and skate and play tennis and golf? Not at the country clubs and resorts that banned them. Who was the first American Jew to earn Olympic medals in a Nordic sport? Tune in and learn about the role that Borscht Belt hotels such as Grossinger's played in teaching immigrant Jews the skills they would need to become, well, American.

LOVE IS ALL AROUND

Bingeing on the old Mary Tyler Moore Show took me back to my own first job--like Mary, I worked in a newsroom--and led me to ponder what we've lost and gained in decreeing that any type of workplace intimacy is verboten.

POR QUE, PORQUOI, WARUM ...

Were you forced to take a foreign language in high school? Do you remember sitting through hour after hour of language lab? So many people now speak English, why should we Americans bother to learn Spanish or French or German or Chinese or Urdu? And why on earth would anyone approaching their final years on the planet care if they could correctly conjugate the verb hacer?

GET A DOG, or REST IN PEACH

I really, really want a dog. Why don't I get one? If I do, will you pay for all its vet bills? Does everyone need to be a doggie parent to a furbaby? Can't you just own a mutt?