Looking like a skeleton is no longer just for Halloween; it’s the latest Hollywood trend on the fast track to becoming a beauty standard.

As award seasons and fashion week converged, shockingly skeletal women were walking the red carpet and sashaying down runways.

You could spot Ozempified actresses on the red carpet sporting collarbones and sternum like another accessory from Van Cleef and Arpels. We are watching the glamorization of malnourishment.

Tone Deaf

The red carpet trend that has nothing to do with clothes

The media is completely tone deaf when it recently declared Demi Moore’s emaciated arms as “toned.” What message are they sending? These arms are not “toned,” they are skeletal and anorexic.

Make no bones about it; this trend towards skeletal beauty is dangerous.

I should know. I was once anorexic.

A Bone of Contention

For decades, I was obsessed with my bones, keeping a mental checklist.

Clavicle, collar bones clear and visible; Sternums up front and at attention. Hip bones that needed to protrude sharply, distinctly lying down, and ribs that could be easily felt.

I checked and rechecked the condition of my bones.

Truth is, I still do. Ironically, despite all the attention I gave to my bones, they still ended up saddled with osteoporosis, the one thing I could not control.

As bodies disappear, the expectation that has plagued me for decades has not disappeared.

The Disappearing Body Positivity Movement

After a decade of body positivity, the pendulum is swinging back. Bodies are shrinking again.  The body positivity movement ended the second thinness became injectable.

With the introduction of weight loss drugs like Ozempic, the standard is back to thinness in a way never seen before – the ideal isn’t just skinny, it’s skeletal. And the message is trickling down to everyday women, comparing themselves to bodies that are sculpted and molded by the pharmaceutical industry.

Rather than attempting to reach a healthy body weight, the Ozempic era appears to be more of a competition to see who can get closest to emaciation.

This is the mindset of someone with an eating disorder. Women are being shepherded into anorexia by GLP-1’s.

I achieved this the old-fashioned way, without drugs.

Just a debilitating disease called Anorexia Nervosa.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2026. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Make America Great Again or Make America White Again?

That is the question I ask in my short, but timely video “American Diversity Whitewash” that takes apart the fake image of diversity sold to Americans for decades and how it has helped create the white-washed world of Donald Trump.

The video is based on my collage “American Diversity Whitewash,” which will be on view at The Hecksher Museum in Huntington.

Critiquing the politics of belonging, the centerpiece of the collage features a John Hancock Insurance ad from 1947 directing us to look at diversity as seen through a white-only lens. “No two families are alike,” announces the headline to this mid-century advertisement.

Yes, there is great diversity in America, the vintage ad seems to imply … that is, as long as you are white, middle-class, and Protestant.

This old-fashioned recipe for what is a real American is still used by the Trump administration and his supporters. Emboldened white supremacists are tearing at the fabric of democracy as entitled white Americans are frightened by the browning of America.

Watch Video

Reimagined as a video in collaboration with John Martin and narrated by me, it is filled with vintage ads and illustrations from my vast collection, becoming a cinematic collage.  I wanted to take the glossy myth of America as presented in the popular media of mid-century America, that mythical place that Trump wants us to return to, and tear it up frame by frame.

Using bold, unsettling visuals, I can expose the fantasy of “real Americans” that keeps resurfacing in modern politics.

What feels urgent is how these visual myths are being actively repackaged in contemporary political culture. They are being repurposed by the U.S. Department of Labor in their series of posters touting The American Dream and Our Homeland that look eerily like the vintage illustration. Relying on nostalgia and simplification, they present a version of America that is aspirational on the surface while leaving out diversity

I want to invite the viewer to look again at the images we think we already know, which, like a toxic overspill, have never really left us. Now they are being reframed and recharged in the present to shape what we believe America still is or should be.

Make America Great Again or White Again? We all know the answer as we watch the race to redistrict and return to the Jim Crow era.

We are living in a time when “Make America Great Again” means erasing who America became.

NOTE:
A special thanks to John Martin and Seth Chitwood for their invaluable skills in producing and editing.

Exhibit

I am honored to have my collage and video “American Diversity Whitewash” included in The Hecksher Museum of Art’s Long Island Biennial with the timely theme “Just Powers.”  Responding to the legacies of the Declaration of Independence, the exhibition brings together diverse perspectives of artists to reveal how democratic ideals of freedom and liberty are experienced, interpreted, challenged, and reimagined today.

Make America Great Again or Make America White Again?

That is the question I ask in my short, but timely video “American Diversity Whitewash” that takes apart the fake image of diversity sold to Americans for decades and how it has helped create the white-washed world of Donald Trump.

The video is based on my collage “American Diversity Whitewash,” which will be on view at The Hecksher Museum in Huntington.

Critiquing the politics of belonging, the centerpiece of the collage features a John Hancock Insurance ad from 1947 directing us to look at diversity as seen through a white-only lens. “No two families are alike,” announces the headline to this mid-century advertisement.

Yes, there is great diversity in America, the vintage ad seems to imply … that is, as long as you are white, middle-class, and Protestant.

This old-fashioned recipe for what is a real American is still used by the Trump administration and his supporters. Emboldened white supremacists are tearing at the fabric of democracy as entitled white Americans are frightened by the browning of America.

Watch Video

Reimagined as a video in collaboration with John Martin and narrated by me, it is filled with vintage ads and illustrations from my vast collection, becoming a cinematic collage.  I wanted to take the glossy myth of America as presented in the popular media of mid-century America, that mythical place that Trump wants us to return to, and tear it up frame by frame.

Using bold, unsettling visuals, I can expose the fantasy of “real Americans” that keeps resurfacing in modern politics.

What feels urgent is how these visual myths are being actively repackaged in contemporary political culture. They are being repurposed by the U.S. Department of Labor in their series of posters touting The American Dream and Our Homeland that look eerily like the vintage illustration. Relying on nostalgia and simplification, they present a version of America that is aspirational on the surface while leaving out diversity

I want to invite the viewer to look again at the images we think we already know, which, like a toxic overspill, have never really left us. Now they are being reframed and recharged in the present to shape what we believe America still is or should be.

Make America Great Again or White Again? We all know the answer as we watch the race to redistrict and return to the Jim Crow era.

We are living in a time when “Make America Great Again” means erasing who America became.

NOTE:
A special thanks to John Martin and Seth Chitwood for their invaluable skills in producing and editing.

Exhibit

I am honored to have my collage and video “American Diversity Whitewash” included in The Hecksher Museum of Art’s Long Island Biennial with the timely theme “Just Powers.”  Responding to the legacies of the Declaration of Independence, the exhibition brings together diverse perspectives of artists to reveal how democratic ideals of freedom and liberty are experienced, interpreted, challenged, and reimagined today.

The Heckscher Museum of Art 2 Prime Avenue Huntington, N.Y. 

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2026. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Yesterday, my thoughts were all about my mother. Today I’m thinking of my father Marvin, on his 9^th yahrzeit. As so many of us who are children of the greatest generation, there is an uncomfortable relief I feel that he is not here to see the country he loved and fought for destroyed.

The post-war world of tomorrow that fueled my father’s dreams and was passed on to me is gone. I cry for the America they passed on to us that is no longer.

My father’s favorite expression was “It’s your America,” emblematic of a time and place, a post-war spirit he maintained all his life.

This was so important to him that my brother and I had it inscribed on his grave.

He would use that expression for a wide range of situations whether in response to my telling him I needed to miss one of our regular Sunday visits to march in the gay Pride Parade, when he’d exclaim Its Your America!  and utter it with the same enthusiasm if one wanted to indulge in that extra slice of caloric rich cake – Hey, why not, It’s Your America.

Silly or important, freedom of choice was the American way.

It’s your America, he would exclaim- a country defined by its generosity of spirit, opportunity, openness, and tolerance to be and do whatever you wanted.

My father had an extra element of sunny optimism that gave him what can best be described as a “can-do” ism that once defined Americans.

That America, his America, is what he fought for in WWII, and what his family and my mothers family on the Homefront sacrificed for.

My father’s life was profoundly shaped by that war and the post-war experience, which influenced his attitudes and expectations, one that he believed enabled him to live out the American Dream.

I cry at my father’s grave, inscribed with his favorite saying  “It’s your America,”  a phrase filled with boosterish possibilities of the greatness of our nation, where anything is possible.

No Daddy, today, “it’s  not  my America.”

I miss you, and I miss America.

Mother’s Day is a complicated day for so many of us.

For those like me who no longer have a living mother yet live with their spirit and love every day it can be a difficult day of longing, deeply missing their presence.

Equally difficult are those whose mothers were sadly never cut out to be mothers and could never give their children what they needed, making it a different day of longing, and a different experience of loss.

My heart is with all whose own hearts might be hurting on Mother’s Day.

When was the last time Donnie consulted a dictionary? Even a thesaurus?

Words matter, but it doesn’t seem to matter much to Trump.

Is it any surprise a man accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women and brags of grabbing women by the pussy would call our latest strike on Iran “ just a love tap?”  Did a jury misunderstand that his attack on E Jean Carrol in a Bergdorf dressing room was merely a “Love Tap”?

A look in the dictionary will tell you a love tap is “a light touch used to show affection.

“A gentle tap on the body of another as a sign of praise or affection.”

Who knew Trump felt so warm and fuzzy about Iran?

With my dog Max 1995

At this age, I may have lost count of how many people I’ve slept with in my life, but I can count on my hand the number of dogs with whom I’ve shared my bed.

Only two.

You always remember your first, and my yellow Labrador retriever, Max, was memorable. (Frankly, a lot more memorable than the awkward 19-year-old closeted gay boy who holds that human distinction )

For thirteen years, Max shared our bed in the city, the Hamptons, and a sleighbed in Vermont.  At over one hundred pounds, there was a lot of dog to love, and boy, did I love Max. I never minded sleeping on the outer edge of our bed when I snuck into bed late at night when I came in from a night out carousing with friends.

But once Max passed away, my husband Hersh issued an edict, “No more dogs in the bed.” I’m certain I argued my case, but going against a skilled litigator, my arguments fell flat.

Over the next 24 years, our bed was empty of any canine companionship. I would sneak Emerson and then Stanley onto the bed for a quick make-out session, but they slept on their own dog bed at the foot of ours.

When Stanley died in 2024, I may not have known who our next dog would be, but one thing I was certain of -they would be allowed to sleep on the bed with us. That reign of bed banishment imposed by my husband a quarter of a century ago would end.

With Moe

Now Moe is our constant bedmate, and I can’t imagine any other way. The bliss I have sleeping with Moe is indescribable. The joy and tenderness it has brought to Hersh is a delight to watch.

It brought the pack together in ways they were meant to function.

I get to wake up every morning with a sweet smile on my face, and in these times, that is really something.

How many of you sleep with your fur babies?

When little Johnny walked up to the classroom blackboard to work out an arithmetic problem, he had no idea the firestorm his chalk scribblings would create.

At the first sight of the threatening numerical combination of 8647 written out for all to see, his eagle-eyed teacher swiftly sent Johnny to the principal’s office, where a group of stern truant officers sat in wait. Without so much as a conversation, they whisked him off to a Juvenile Detention Center, where this would-be anarchist/ assassin would live out his childhood years.

This classroom caper is as farcical as the intense reaction to former FBI Director James Comey’s 2025 Instagram post of seashells spelling 8647, which has been so overblown as to transform a cryptic image into a major political and legal firestorm.

Meanwhile, daily there are social media postings of words and symbolic numbers that are hateful and dangerous, but allowed to be posted without consequences. Without accountability.  

There is so much hate in America.  Some of it is coded in language some in numbers.

So much hate.

I’ve lost count.

Of all the mass shootings.

Of murdered children, LGBTQ, African Americans, and Jews.

I’ve lost count of all the violence.

The vicious name-calling.

Defacing of property.

I’ve lost count of all the hate crimes in our country.

But some people are busy counting, playing with numbers that have until now eluded me.

Their numbers are codes for hate.

They are counting out who actually counts in their perverted world.

Discovering Numbers

Not long ago I learned firsthand as a Jew that  I don’t count.

Targeted on this blog with an anti-semitic rant that referenced the numbers 109/110.

“Ask yourself,” this coward smugly wrote, “why Jews have been tossed out of 109 counties.  Is it 109 counties that are wrong or is it the group who are forced to leave?”

He ended with “110 and never again.”

Numeric Shorthand For Hate

White Washing their world. Vintage illustration from school textbook “Exploring Numbers”

There is this mysterious world of numbers that has nothing to do with trigonometry but everything to do with hate.

When it comes to numbers white supremacists are interested in subtraction, not addition. Division, not multiplication.

This I learned.

When it comes to numbers white supremacists are interested in subtraction, not addition. Division, not multiplication.

The number 109 is white supremacist numeric shorthand for an anti-Semitic claim that Jews have been expelled from 109 different countries.

Various anti-Semites have compiled lists of alleged Jewish “expulsions” ranging from 100 to more than 1,000 in number, but the figure of 109 is the most commonly cited and probably originates with a list of “109 locations” appearing on a longstanding Australian anti-Semitic website.

Anti-Semites use this figure to claim that Jews must be a malicious and harmful people to have been expelled from so many places; they also use the figure to call for the expulsion of Jews from countries where they currently live.

The concept of 109 expulsions has also led to frequent use of the number 110 by white supremacists, generally to urge that the United States be the next and 110th place to expel Jews.

Learning Through Practice

The history of Jewish discrimination, hatred, and expulsion was, I thought, consigned to the past.

Jews were historically harshly persecuted, denied entrance into certain professions, prohibited from owning land, forced to pay extra taxes, and excluded from the normal education system. They were gradually expelled from Europe: from England in 1290, from France in 1306 and from Spain and Portugal in 1492. They were also expelled from Hungary in 1376, from Sicily in the 15th century, from Bavaria in 1470, from Bohemia in 1542, and suffered pogroms in Russia in 1881, 1891, 1897, and 1903.

There is almost too much hate in the past to count.

Today 110 is sometimes combined with the numerical code 148 creating 1488-110

14 is shorthand for the 14 words, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

14/88 is a combination of the fourteen words and the eighth letter of the alphabet “H”  repeated twice standing for “Heil Hitler.”

I was never good at math as a child.

Numbers made me anxious.

But not half as anxious as I am today about the vicious use of certain numbers.

And the uncountable hate and destruction they bring.

People must be held accountable.

Even as I am firm in my resolve each of us counts.

 © Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2026 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

There was no McDonald’s delivery to the Oval Office during the King’s recent visit.

Despite his love of Big Macs, Donald Trump was specifically ordered NOT to serve McDonald’s to King Charles under any circumstances.

The Monarch utterly hates fast food. He is no Burger King.

But his grandfather, King George VI, had a soft spot for the food of the people.

There is a precedent for presidents serving guests a more laid-back fast food feast.

When it comes to casual cuisine, Donald T loves his Mickey D’s, but it may come as a surprise that FDR fancied Nathan’s hot dogs. When it came to enjoying the food of the common folk, Frankie D.’s heart was all a flutter for frankfurters.

Eighty-seven years ago, the lowly hot dog was ennobled by Royalty when it was served by President Franklin Roosevelt at a picnic at his country home for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England.

A diplomatic visit made gastronomic history. The Royals ate their first hot dog.

History is Made

It was not an insignificant visit. For the first time in American history, a King of England set foot on U.S. soil.

The Royals had been on a hectic 4-day American tour in the spring of 1939. Arriving in Washington DC in June, the King and Queen had been treated to all the formalities one would expect from a State visit. In the same opulent State Dining room where 70 years later platters of Big Macs and McNuggets would be served by the glow of ornate candelabras, the Royal couple was feted with a formal state dinner.

After a whirlwind tour of DC and a visit to the N.Y. World’s Fair, where they were given the red carpet treatment,   FDR invited the weary Monarchs to a casual picnic at his bucolic home in Hyde Park, N.Y. The Hudson Valley provided an informal backdrop for this visit of the British sovereigns and the nation’s first family.

Eleanor Roosevelt decided no All-American picnic would be complete without hot dogs.

But these would be no ordinary dogs.

No, these would be Coney Island hot dogs. Since Nathan’s considered itself “the king of hot dogs,” it made sense that their dogs were fit for a King. So, straight from Surf Avenue in Brooklyn to upper crust Hyde Park, the hot dogs were ordered.

When word got out that plebian hot dogs were to be served to the King and Queen of England  the public was dubious at best.

Snobs everywhere, including Roosevelt’s own mother balked at the thought of a hot dog being presented to His Majesty.  His proper mother, Sara Delano, was horrified not only at the choice of food but of inviting cooks, gardeners, and other staffers to the picnic.

Snooty folks looked down on the lowly frankfurter, though in fact the hot dog could trace its family history farther back than any living king.

A Hot Dog Makes Him Lose Control

But the pearl clutchers could relax.

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth loved it. For the royal couple, this was a novelty never having sampled a hot dog before. The King, it was said, had been looking forward to sampling “this most favorite American snack.”

Sitting on the front porch of FDR’s new stone cottage overlooking the Hudson River was the perfect, relaxed setting to enjoy the picnic.  The hot dogs were served on a silver tray, but the Royals, like everyone else ate off paper plates,  albeit on a table and not balancing it like others on their laps.

Unsure how to properly chow down on a hot dog encased in a doughy bun,  the Queen politely asked the President for some etiquette advice on how to navigate a hot dog.

“Very simple. Push it into your mouth and keep pushing it until it is all gone,” the President was supposed to have said. Demurely, the Queen elected to use a knife and fork instead.

The King seemed to have no such reservation and enjoyed it with gusto, so much so he asked for seconds, which made front page headlines the next day. The “N.Y. Times” headline announced: “King Tries Hot Dog and Asks For More.” According to the article, “the King enjoyed his 2 hot dogs with beer.”

It was in fact front page stuff when King George VI attacked the hot dog at the Little White House picnic at Hyde Park. Wires burned with descriptions of the event and wireless, radio, and cable carried the word around the world.

Headlines ranged from “King Bites Dog;” “With Mustard, is Royal Order” and “First Lady Triumphant; Royalty Eats Hot Dogs.”

Hot Dog Summit

Crafty as always, FDR had more on his mind than a menu when he called for this picnic . To him this would be an opportunity. Call it hot dog diplomacy.

The trip was undertaken in the shadows of WWII and Britain needed U.S. support. At the time, U.S. foreign policy was isolationists. On the brink of war, FDR realized the necessity of fostering closer political and social ties with Britain.

He needed to win the hearts of the American people.

Roosevelt planned every minute detail of the visit to ensure the King’s success in winning over the sympathy and support of the American people. The picnic was the perfect setting  for FDR to show that despite being royalty they were “just folks.”

FDR hoped the visit would change the perceptions of the American people which in turn allowed him to do more for Britain.

Three months after the picnic England declared war on Germany, and FDR was able to convince Congress and the American people to take steps to aid Britain while still maintaining American neutrality.

Did these hot dogs help save the Western world from the Nazis?

That’s hard to say, but several years later, entrenched in the War ourselves, Roosevelt was such a fan of Hot Dog Diplomacy that he had Nathan’s hot dogs sent to Yalta when he met with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin.

The rest is history.