Miss Peri Lyons: The Ampelopsis Diaries

2026-03-03T23:56:38.331-05:00

Human beings

Out Of This Nettle: Danger, We Pluck This Flower Courage

2026-03-03T23:56:38.330-05:00

One of the hardest things about writing in public (i.e., "blogging"..erp... dreadful word)...is NOT writing about people you know well. -For some reason, it feels okay to write about encounters with people I will most likely never see again, but writing about friends and family seems...unfair.

I guess my ethical justification would be, that the conversations I have with the nice lady who suffers with me through waxing/Girl Maintenance stuff, are all held in public [okay..not some of the waxing], are for public consumption, and are kept at an agreed-upon notion of shallow depth...a faux intimacy and therefore okay for folkses to read.

Whereas: one's more intimate connections are, well, involuntary...my Mom didn't choose to be my mom; the man I had a big love with, didn't love me in order to be written about; I love my friends helplessly;...and it seems unfair to write about other people's intimate lives... without their express consent.

Of course, one could argue that nobody has actually SIGNED a confidentiality agreement, either ("oh for God's sake Mother...just initial here! let's not keep the notary waiting!") ..so everyone is, legally speaking?- fair game. But I guess I feel some things Just Aren't Done. [Note: this past summer, I had some private emails hijacked and made public. But that wasn't my fault. So screw it. Am SO done apologizing.]

2026-03-03T23:56:38.329-05:00

A Phoenix's Tale: Or, How To Become The Mythological Creature You Were Meant to Be

2026-03-03T23:56:38.328-05:00

Joseph Campbell Was Right

Because my life exploded last year, I was able to save a man's life, last night.

Because I went through the worst illness I have ever had, I have not been sick a day since. Nor will I be. (God willin' and the creek don't rise, that is.)

Because my mother and I butted heads all during my adolescence and beyond, we now have a loving, enormously healing friendship. I know it's healing because she's healthy (after double pneumonia) and making plans excitedly for the future. (Her doctor confirmed, with surprised pleasure, that she had healed "miraculously" fast.) . -I"ll KNOW we have healed completely when we can go clothes shopping together. The only thing she DOESN'T understand is my rather unexpected new passion for...golf. Yes. Golf.

"Tale of the Phoenix" is about how to USE the worst to GET TO the best.

"Tale of the Phoenix" is about learning to trust yourself again. Except this time? Better.

*****************************

"Wait," I can hear you asking. (And what a lovely voice you have!) " "Phoenix? As in, "Arizona"?"

Nope. "Phoenix" as in "a mythological birdie."

The myth of the Phoenix is ancient for a reason. Like most myths it is The Human People's way of transmitting very helpful information to future generations, in the form of an eternal truth... hidden in a story. Human People have an amazing way of finding out The Truth. But since we're all separate individuals, and we're all always being distracted by the movies playing in our heads, it's hard for, say, Jake to tell, say, Ashley, that he has found an Eternal Truth,. Because if he isn't really, really careful about how he says it? Ashley will have him committed. So he can hint at the truth in a story. In fact, obviously the story tellers of our times who have been able to do that--wrap Eternal Truth up in protective layers, and present it to Non Eternal Human Bodies in a form that they will find delicious---have become greatly rewarded in their lifetimes and have become, when they Left their Human People shells [um, "died"] immortal. Myths do this: at the chewy caramel center of every ancient myth, under the attractive story, there's a truth so large it has been recognized over and over again subconsciously by each generation. Truth lasts.

Of course, truth told too confrontationally, or without allowance for the different "modality" of the listener, usually gets the messenger killed. Because of the differing structure of each Human Person's modality (there are 12 modalities- more on this later.) Truth wrapped in something the culture you're living in is going through AT THIS MOMENT, is easier to swallow. And once swallowed, to digest. And once digested, it becomes a part of your being. [Let's skip the next step for the time being.] And once the Truth is a part of your being, your spiritual gravitational mass becomes bigger. And--like the famous heavy object suspended in the rubber sheet--your life circumstances start rolling TOWARDS the bigger gravitational mass. This is a known and recognized phenomenon, expressed by different wise spirits in different ways: one of the best known (and best expressed!) - is my Goethe who says: "Whatever you can do, or think you can do, begin it: boldness has genius and beauty and power within it." He was onto something.

However, there's a LOT more to it than that.

What Are You, A Quitter?

2026-03-03T23:56:38.327-05:00

            I. Love. Smoking.

             I just do. I can -and have- given up every other vice known to man, but flash a pack of American Spirit Blues at me, and my limbic brain goes "Gimme! Me Want! NOW!!" - I don't know what this means: that it's a way of closing down my heart chakra, or , as 19th Century French Author Colette said, "Smoking is a way to inject idleness into one's day", or that Freud was right and all men and chicks have a secret death wish?

               I think it just means that I really like smoking.

               However,

2026-03-03T23:56:38.326-05:00

Meditation is better than drugs"- Russell Simmons.
-Who either is very good at meditation-or doesn't have very good drugs.

(Just kidding. Am seriously anti-drug.-Unless they're free.-Oh, damn.Just kidding again. Really.}

2026-03-03T23:56:38.325-05:00

Talking to the dead can really take it out of a girl.

It’s amazing what a girl can get used to, though. I mean, three years ago I was showing up to my job at the Louis Vuitton flagship store on 5th Avenue, and grateful to get roughly three fifty a week to sell hideously overprices watches. I would stand there, in my tasteful uniform—which was, inexplicably, the color of raw liver—and tell basketball stars that what they REALLY needed was a watch designed for WASP professional sailboat racers in Newport. AND they’d agree with me.

These days, I am summoned-usually at a moment’s notice—to the pied-a-terres of people whose names appear on Page Six, to reassure them that everything’s going to be fine.

Which sometime? I can’t do.

The biggest difference between my life now and my life then, aside from EVERYTHING, is one simple thing: I can’t lie. Now, it’s not like I lied a lot before, but let’s face it: you can’t have a successful career in luxury retail without occasionally winging it a little. And by “winging it”, I mean “flat out makin’ shit up.” –I never thought of this as lying, since I wasn’t ever misrepresenting actual facts, but the actual fact is, I would occasionally ….embellish. “This watch will make previously unattainable women love you,” I said to one man. “This watch will make your mother in law regret every single mean thing she’s ever said behind your back,” I told a wide-eyed woman from Ireland. And who’s to say those things won’t come true? Because, as it turns out, a LOT of things I’ve told people HAVE come true. Which is how I ended up where I am.

Where I am, today is at the apartment of a young woman whose daddy is rich, and her mommy is…richer. As in, a billionairess. The apartment has the comfort and clean lined simplicity I’ve come to learn are the hallmarks of GENUINE wealth. No marble, no curlicues: those are the signifiers of the newly arrived, the trying too hard, the new ones. REAL wealth whispers: it says “there are no sharp edges here, no unpleasant surprises…everything exists to make life easier in a way you won’t even notice…till you leave.”

She’s a lovely girl. I am genuinely, tremendously fond of her. But in my new life, the life where I visit with mystery and common sense, I am not allowed-anymore-to lie. So she asks me questions, as I take her hand and close my eyes, and I tell her what I see: pictures, images, memories of my own reconstituted as signs and signals to tell me what I need to tell this girl. I don’t understand, at all, how it works. But experience, practice, and the testimony of hundreds of clients have confirmed one thing: I’m probably right.

How did this happen? How did a woman who has never believed in psychicness, let alone life after death—I mean, puh-LEEZE!!—who is the daughter of two Ivy League professors, one a scientist; a woman who loves reading history and nonfiction because fiction makes her impatient—wind up telling fortunes? How does someone who has subscribed to “The Skeptical Inquirer” since teenagehood, wind up being the poster child for credulous irrationalism? In other words….What the hell?

The answer is both roundabout and simple.

I took a course once. It was one of those weekend, life -enhancing “human potential movement” courses that sprouted, flourished and vanished with depressing alacrity in the 1980’s. There was an exercise that has always stayed with me. In the exercise, a participant would leave the room while his/her “classmates” hid an object in a 20-foot by 20-foot square box filled with sand.
When the hapless participant re-entered, he/she was supposed to find the object…with the only “help” being that, when he/she got “warm”—that is, got CLOSER to the hidden object—the other classmates would clap louder. When he or she got “colder”—that is, farther away from the object of desire—her helpers would clap softer. After a few rounds of this, it got easier and easier to listen to the “positive” reinforcement, and the objects were found faster and faster and faster. The lesson being exactly what my father used to tell me: “Go with what works.”

Which is how I got here. I always knew I was…well, if not “psychic” (a word I actively detest), then…something. Something odd. Something that could see ghosts and know what her friends were thinking. Something that didn’t fit.

I saw my first ghost when I was a lanky, sarcastic, 14 year old atheist. My parents had bought an 1840 deaconry upstate in 1963, and had spent the time since filling it with children, hope, love and bad carpeting. I was the youngest by a long shot, so much younger that my nickname as a baby was “Ooops!”. So when I was 14, all the other sibs had moved on to college, ill-considered careers in theater, and starter marriages. There was one bedroom that my older brother Evan had vacated, that I had never liked going into, but which ALSO had—and this was very important because of a serious heat wave that summer—the MOST efficient air conditioner in the house. If not the world. But I digress.

So I went to go sleep in that room, a big top floor anomaly with an asymmetric vaulted ceiling and an irrational miasma of discontent.

I was sleeping as soundly as only a 14 year old athletically inclined dormouse CAN sleep, when suddenly I awoke into full, startled consciousness. Now, to this day, it takes two hours and 13 snooze alarm button taps to render me even mildly human, so that was remarkable in and of itself. But what was even more remarkable, was the woman standing by the side of my bed.

You know when you are at a party, and ask some random lone woman which way to the ladies’ room, and she starts telling you in completely inappropriate detail about how her boyfriend just screwed some other girl? This was the same kind of energy. It felt like she was trying to get me involved, and weirdly complicit with, her “story”. The energy was needy, urgent, importunate. I was sitting up and looking at her: somehow, her appearance didn’t go with the very modern feeling energy, as she was dressed in a long, ecru lace dress, and for some reason it’s hard to reconcile period clothing with modern neuroticism. Still, she managed.

As I stared at her, I noticed that she had a remarkably oval face, as though someone had drawn a very pretty visage on an uncooked eggshell. Her hair, black and parted in the middle, fell almost to her waist. And she was, well…see through. There’s no other way to describe it. I observed myself observing the curtains behind her, THROUGH her, with the bemused detachment of unbelieving terror.

And then she vanished. After five minutes of nonverbal pleading by my bedside, futile pleading as I never did figure out what she was trying to tell me, she went “zzzzpppp!”-figuratively speaking- and vanished from the ground up.

Leaving me alone in a very well air-conditioned and suddenly incredibly empty room.

Now, I don’t know about you, but after a very upsetting situation, I need a snack. Comfort food. Comfort drink. Comfort. So I made my way two flight down to the kitchen, where pure animal instinct found me putting together a fluffernutter sandwich and a grape juice-and-ginger-ale concoction, when my mother came unexpectedly in.

“Darling! I THOUHT I heard you! Why in heaven’s name are you AWAKE?”. Mom asked, in the MidAtlantic actor’s voice she’d kept even after leaving the stage for academia.

“Oh my God, Mom! I just saw a GHOST!!”

She puttered about, making herself some cocoa. (From scratch. No Quik Chocolate Milk Mix for HER.)

“Oh, darling, you DO know that you were hallucinating. Ghosts simply don’t exist. They just DON’T! You were having a waking dream experience.”

I bridled a bit at having my True Ghost Story snatched away from me. Besides, it WAS real. What hallucination lasts for five cogent and unwilling minutes?

“Mo-OM, I DID!! I DID see a ghost! I wasn’t hallucinating!! I’m not nuts!”

She reached the Ritz Crackers down from over the stove. “Darling, did you READ that book I lent you? “The Origins of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind”? SUCH a wonderful theory. Jaynes says that the biblical prophets were simply experiencing a neurological storm between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Doesn’t that explain it, darling? Really?” She came and sat not too near me, with her cocoa and the crackers, still in their wax paper roll.

“Mom. MOM. I am SO not an Old Testament Prophet. I’m not even sure what you’re talking about. Of COURSE I didn’t read that book. NOBODY has ever read that book. The guy who WROTE it didn’t read that book. Anyway. I SAW A GHOST, Mom! Really!”

She sighed in a patented Mom theatrical, humoring-me way.
“Darling, let me ask you something.”
“WHAT??”

“Was it a woman? Did she have a very oval shaped face and remarkably long black hair, and a sort of white dress?”

“YES!! TOTALLY! Except I think it was ecru.”

She blew out a long, cocoa-scented sigh. “Oh, darling. She doesn’t exist! I’ve walked through her a NUMBER of times. On the second floor.”

I just stared at her, mouth agape, as she calmly finished her crackers.

This might explain why it’s taken me so long to come to terms with my, um, “gift”.
Let ALONE tell others.

Back to the present. I am holding Laetitia’s hand. She asks me if her marriage will work out.

I get a “hit” of Hudson, her fella.Although he’s at rehearsal thirty blocks away, utterly distracted, he somehow feels my intrusion. He is waving me away. He doesn’t want to be read. Some people can tell, completely unconsciously, when I’m rummaging around in the sockdrawer of their soul, and sometimes ? They raise an objection. I can’t blame them…I would too.

“Um…I’m not sure. He’s got a very quicksilver temperament. He doesn’t live for any moment but “NOW”. Is he a Gemini?” [Even though I agree with Douglas Adams, who famously said that found it hard to believe that great whirling lumps of rock in the sky really care about what I’m doing Tuesday, I HAVE found that certain “energy dealings’” go with certain signs.} His energy “weighs” the same in my mind as other Geminis I have known: it feels light but disciplined, contained yet free, and very much rooted in intellect rather than emotion. How the hell does one describe a “feel” like that? Sorry if it doesn’t make sense to you…the only justiciaction I have is: it feels very spot-on to me.

“Um, I’m not actually sure.”

She tares at me intently. I can tell that, any moment, it’s going to occur to her that it’s my bloody JOB to be sure!! THAT’S why I’m THERE! THAT’s the POINT of me.

Except? It isn’t. My job is to be truthful always, to rummage around in people’s own personal weather systems, and report back as best I can. Sometimes I’m not allowed to “see” a definite answer. I feel there are three possible reasons for this:
That pesky “free will” thing” if someone doesn’t want to be read, I have to respect their right to spiritual privacy.-Dammit.
Sometimes? The client has to learn a lesson/make a decision/ find out an unknown BY HERSELF, and/or in her own time, for her soul to learn what it needs to larn in order to grow.
I actually just…don’t know. It happens. If this were an exact science, I would be teaching it at Harvard. Someday, I believe it will be. Maybe someday I’ll be teaching it. But right now? I’m selftaught, self-certified, and flying blind.
Thank GOD I’m verifiably accurate.

This reading goes very well, otherwise. I get the name of a close friend of hers who died last year, something I simply could not have knowm. Oddly, I remember reading about this boy’s death, and being little sneer-y about his lifestyle choices. I wince now to remember that….one of the reasons I think I’m supposed to do this work is to learn compassion, as well as commitment to truth, as well as how to say what I feel, rather than saying what folks want to hear.-In fact. I “get” this guy so strongly that I start weeping, something I REALLY try not to do, as I think it’s unprofessional. Can’t help it, though: he was such a lovely soul, and in such pain when he died. Also, he liked frogs. I like frogs. I tell Laetitia this, and she silently goes to her computer and shows me a photograph of him with his collection of toy frogs. We both start laughing, in the middle of our tears.

And that’s why I do what I do.

2026-03-03T23:56:38.324-05:00

Part Four of the Randomness Trilogy

2026-03-03T23:56:38.323-05:00

father's Day

If I was the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade "Drama Queen" Float, my late Dad could have best been described as the casual bystander wearing a carefully deadpan expression...and holding a pin. And that sound? That's the helium, leaking out of my pretensions.

I remember being a teenager, on the phone, within earshot of Dad. I declaimed sonorously to a friend that "The heart has five chambers. Just like a revolver, babe."

There was a pause. Dad, in his wingback Dad Chair, waited for me to hang up. Without putting down the copy of the "Nation" he was holding up in front of him, said, "Four."

I was puzzled. "Four WHAT, Pops?" I asked.

"Four chambers. The heart has four chambers. You might want to switch to a Remington."
*********************

Once? There was a generation that came and went, as generations by definition have to. My Dad's generation was a very specific one: New York Jews born to immigrants in the 20's and 30's. You can see and hear the wisdom, ruefulness and brilliant humor of that moment in great Woody Allen pieces; in the Talmudically wise humor of Mel Brooks and the corruscating, impatient brilliance of Mailer. Like Woody Allen, he grew up reading and emulating the Algonquin Round table wit of Robert benchley and Dorothy Parker, the lapidary comic genius of SJ perelman, and the chaotic, "smarter outsider" humor of the Marx brothers. Like Mailer, he also loved Rafael Sabatini's "Captain Blood" and other improbably romantic sea shanty tall tales. (He also had similar bright blue eyes and fabulous curly hair.) Like Mel Brooks, he simply had no room for pomposity...his own or anyone else's. And like Brooks, whose now-obscure-but-completely-indispensable comedy recordings of "The 2000 Year Old Man" were hysterically funny and also profound (in retrospect), Dad taught in jokes..taught in his practice as a doctor; in his visiting professorships at Columbia and Harvard; and taught his kids, who amused and bemused him in turns.

Dad had an incurable case of realism. Thank God. He grew up in the Depression. his father, David, owned a hardware store on the Upper East Side, where david worked 6 days a week for 40 years.(The store is still there, intact, and looks like a hardware museum, right down to the barrels of nails on the floor); David started a fund for his son's medical school education the day his son (that is, my Dad..can we just agree to call him "marvin" from here?) was born, and that was pretty much that. Like many first-born sons of jewish immigrants at that time, Marvin was treated as a sort of visiting young god, and I'm going to say that I don't think that that was a bad thing, entirely...it gave him the confidence his astonishing intelligence needed for ballast.
I can't imagine starting college at 14, as he did; I can't imagine finishing medical school at 21, as he did; and i certainly can't imagine what it must have been like to be a Very New York Very Jewish kid, at the University of Virgina fifty years ago, as he was...it must have been like going to school on the moon.Dad used to say that the first time his very Jewish father visited him at UVA, his Dad was completely nonplussed by 16 year old Marvin calling him "sah" ["sir", in a completely phony Virginia accent.] Dad grew out of that phase. But he never grew out of being aware of and amused by, pretensions: his own and other folks'.

What a difference a year makes...

2026-03-03T23:56:38.322-05:00

       This post has a very very happy ending.
       Honestly? It's just the beginning and the middle, that totally suck. So stay with me here, cherished reader.

   A little over a year ago? I was blithely walking the red carpet at Cannes, on the arm of my fiance: a brilliant actor/writer who was not only kind and funny and adoring, but just blindingly handsome as well. The night before , he had re-proposed to me, and then announced our wedding date to our friends and colleagues. I was head over heels and ass-over-teakettle in love. I had found my soulmate: a man whose kindness made his spectacular good looks seem like an afterthought...no mean feat that.

When we got home to NYC, he surprised me with the gift of a gorgeous ginger kitten. As I watched the kitten- whom we named "Hopper"- gambol around our lovely Brooklyn duplex, I was simply and absolutely happy. So happy, that I decided to pull some tarot cards to see what other lipsmacking dishes were going to be on the menu in the astonishingly perfect smorgasbord that was my life.

     Warning. -Kids? -Don't EVER do that. Please.

     I have a practice (and thank heavens, a successful one) as a predictive intuitive consultant. I use tarot as a Jungian tool to access the subconscious blah blah blah. It's also a great predictive tool. --Until it tells you stuff you really don't want to know.

I'll put it this way: right before pulling those cards? I was so blissful. So grateful. So happy.
    And the cards were? SO NOT.
     The Devil. The Moon. The Queen of wands, reversed. {Incidental note: the Queen of Wands is a sagittarius Woman. I am, um...a Pisces. Try though I might to fly to Costa Rica for "sign reassignment surgery.] The heart with three swords through it, which, gotta say, is very hard to try to explain away when reading for someone else. usually i don't even

    And? It turns out "denial" is NOT just "a river in Egypt".

How To Live Without Dying

2026-03-03T23:56:38.321-05:00

It was a year ago that my life ended. Figuratively and very nearly literally.

And began again... better.

-Eventually.

It's a bit tricky to tell this story, because half of it involves someone else. I can tell my half. I can't tell his.

If I was telling this a year ago? I would go into detail.

But it's not a year ago. And the intervening year has taught me so much- almost despite myself. What I've learned the last year has turned baffled despair into resolute hope and joyousness; "victimhood" into gratitude; and anger into understanding.

2026-03-03T23:56:38.320-05:00

Was just wondering why I have been so over-the-top elated today. Irrationally exuberant. And realized: a year ago today?

I didn't die.

Now,, I don't die every day, so far. Knock wood. [SFX: Meteorite crashing into West Village apartment. Spoke too soon.]

A year ago last night, my aorta decided it wanted the evening to itself, and narrowed a bit in order to signal its intention. -You kind of don't want your aorta making decisions like that, unilaterally. It's unsettling. Also not really fair. If my heart valve wants a day off, it can wait 50 years and then get a pretty long vacation: at least, that was my assumption.

Legal Staement

2026-03-03T23:56:38.319-05:00

n the three months since my beloved Dad passed, I have had the pleasure and privilege of taking care of my amazing Mom.

Today is June 13 2011. I have been here since march 7, 2011, when I came home to find my mother sprawled unconscious and alone on the kitchen floor. It took me 15 minutes to lift her bodily. She was in shock from the trauma of having my father pass away in her arms. I do not know where any of my brothers were.

My brother mark has been enormously hepful. He and I stayed when Mom had pneumonia. We took turns for two weeks cooking for her, staying with her (she always had a "bodyguard")keeping Mom safe and healthy until she could sit up by herself.
Mark spelled me for the the two 5 day periods in which i went to the city. Those perioDs were in midmarch and later in June of 2011. Aside from that, I have been keeping my mother company, cheering her up, accompanying her to the clinic when she has had hypertensive attacks; doing laundry, light cleaning and keeping her spirits up.

have seen my brother Evan and his wife Margaret three or possibly four times since dad's death. There was a terribly upsetting incident on March 24th..? My brother Evan had been needlessly hostile and aggressive, and he and his wife sent out emails that were untrue, extremely hurtful, and damaging to my reputation. One of these emails was sent out to 45 people, in which Evan claimed i had stolen a thousand dollars from my mother and in which he called me a "piece of shit." As he knew at the time, I had asked my aunt, Ruth Bricker, to lend me a thousand dollars, as Mom's assets had been frozen and I needed money for groceries and in case of emergency. Although I sent Ruth a check for full repayment, she refused to cash it, saying that she loves and admires me and that the money was a gift in honor of my father. Our grocery receipts will show that I spent that money on groceries.
My mother also cashed several checks from me at this time.

In June of last year, I was taken to the hospital, with a narrowing of the aorta that was consistenT with My ED Primary Diagnosis, as listed by the attnding ED physicians, Dr. Stanley Wu and resident Elvina Khusainova. Attending nurse Ellen Miele RN was also present. At this time, my hospital report states that I am a smoker, who drinks socially and who has no drug use. The form also states that I had the exact dose of my ADD medication, Adderall, in my system, to corresponmd with a prescription written by my physician, Dr. Steven Lamm.

While I was in the hospital, my fiance was seeing another woman, katrina Eugenia. The night I got home from the hospital, I found he had packed my bags and called a car service to take me to my parents' house in Annapolis MD. I went, as i was emotionally and physically drained. The next day, he informed me by email first that he was going to a photo shoot by Katrina Eugenia. I didn't know that it was also going to co-star Katrina Eugenia. He got back from the shoot and broke up with me by email immediately. The next day, Photos from the shoot were posted. In them, Miss Eugenia is in her underwear, and my fiance is undressing. They are obviously having an affair.
I was devastated, especially as heart failure often brings with it an attendant physical side effect: clinical depression.

When I got back, my fiance avoided me, although one night when I stayed in our apartment, I heard and saw him with Miss Eugenia, coming up the stairs. I called out hello to him, and I got a panicky and abusive text message back from him: It said, and i quote from the message, "What the hell are you doing there! Don't you ever fucking come back to the apartment without telling me!" Looking out the window, I had already seen him and a woman answering miss Eugenia's description.

The next month and a half were sheer torture. My fiance slept at Katrina's house every night. He immediately found an apartment for himself. I had no where to go. During this time, I was desperate to stay in the apartment as I was exhausted. However, my credit was not good enough to keep the lease. Nor was my credit good enough to get me another place. Also, I had just realized that my savings were not going to cover anything remotely as large as these expenses were going to be. John gave me $300, and then we spent a months moving stuff into heavy boxes, during a heat wave, while i recovered from my heart problem.

John did not help me. He was distant and abusive.

During this time, when i was desperate, alone, and still suffering from the effects of Acute Ischemic Heart Disease, my brother Evan told me to ask him for help and advice. I wrote an email, which is available online in its entirety, in which i asked if he could possibly so-sign the lease, as I had a potential room mate and enough money to cover the next month's rent. I had a job offer, as well. At no time did i ask my brother for money. I was asking for a respite in order to heal, breathe and not have to put everything i owned into storage.
He wrote nack and said "No", annd I said "That's fine. I love you."

End of story.

Somehow, this plea from his desperately ill younger sister, got re-insterpreted. Despite the written evidence dated 7/10/10 of this email, Evan and his wife somehow decided that i had asked them for 30,000 dollars.

I would like to state emphatically at this time that that was never my intention. The email shows a confused woman who is desperate to please. It does not show, at all, the personality type who would be able to make this demand. Far from being demanding, the tone of the letter is apologetic.

Soon after this, Evan and margaret Thalenberg chose to tell my family, their friends and people whom I'd never met, that:
1) I had not had a heart problem, or if I did, it was caused by Adderall;
2) I had demanded 30,000 dollars from them.

As I had never borrowed money from them, and wouldn't until October 10 2010, when I was desperately ill and too depressed to function, it would never occurred to me that this would be the inference.

Right at this time, I found an illegal sublet. I moved in. I put everything i owned into storage, and paid movers. To date, the cost of being abandoned in such an exceptionally callous way, has been about 24,000 dollars.

The woman from whom I was renting turned out to be unbalanced. I had to move again, in the middle of a clinical depression so deep that I was not functional.

when the heat in the new place turned out to be nonexistent in the coldest weeks in NYC history, I had to break down, move my stuff out, and store it at three different places. I had to borrow money from my dad to live in a 99 dollar a night hotel for a week, while I fulfilled business obligations.

During this time, my brother and my sister visited my parents. From my mother and father's separate recountings, my sister in law demanded that they stop helping me financially. My sister in law grew visibly loud, irrational and threatening. My mother had to forcibly eject my sister-in-law from the house, as my father was having heart palpitations.

The first and only email I got from my sister in law (which is also saved) is dated the day after his death. It says simply, "You left a 500 dollar check to your father on his desk. I am going to deposit it."

That was it.

Since that time, my brother and sister in law have been traveling continuously, enjoying sumPtuous vacations in NYC, Barbados and Portugal. As of today, my brother has visited once in the period since march 30th. My sister in law refuses to accompnay him, citing her antipathy towards me.

Evan and Margaret also misrepresented the truth to my sister Toni. They told her they were paying Mom's bills. In fact, they lent her 3000 dollars in March. They have since demanded, and recieved, repayment in full. A wire transfer went out to them on Friday June 11.

I have sPent all but ten days with my mother: helping her, encouraging her, and making her life easier and more enjoyable. My brother david lives in England and has not visited after Dad's death. Although he did see fit to forward a confidential email I had written to him, in which I expressed my frustration about being slandered, and fanatsized abpout seeking legal action against the source of the malicious and untrue stories being circulated about me. When informed of this breach of confidentiality, I gathered all my strength and went downstairs to apologize to Evan and maragret.
They turned their backs on me. I went upstairs and, finding the Vicodin that my brother Mark has, legally, I shook out 20 with the intention of ending my life. After taking four, I called a friend in the Midwest and said "Talk me out of this." He did. Meanwhile, Maragret cam up to my room and started screamiung "You kicked me in the stomach last July!" As last July I had done nothing of the sort, I was baffled by this.
Ever since then, my family has treated me as anathema. My mother and i have been ostracized by every single friend and relation except Christine and Evan Evans, and Darcy. My niece informed me on the phone that she "doesn't want to be part of my drama"; that "she knows [I]take drugs; and that I was 'almost homesless" so she can't talk to me.
When I stated that I was doing a good job taking care of Mom, my niece sneerringly said "Where ELSE can you GO?" She aslo told me that she "doesn't care at all" about me" and that her parents are "sick of being called all the time with your drama and lies."

An inspection of my phone records in the past decade, available through Crdeo, will show that I have called them perhaps 14 times in the last 10 years, usually to wish them happy birthday. Until June of last year, my life was very good. They also implied that my friendship with Courtney Love was a "drugbuddy" situation. I can provide multiple witness from the Standard hotel and from the A List, who can testify that I was on Courtney's payroll as a coach for her Buddhist Practice. Many, many people have seen us chanting "nam myo renge kyo" tohgether, often for hours at a time. At no time has anyone, ever, seen me take drugs or engage in ay behaviour that would suggest I am participating in drug use. I don't LIKE drugs.

This is adversely affecting my life. The sheer injustice of it all, and the casual bullying by a couple who feel that their possession of more money than most people, puts them above the normal human considerations of justice. kindness and truth,

To sum up: I have been the focus of a malicious campaign to blacken my name with lies. I believe that maragret's hatred for me is traceable to the fact that my very kind parents "adopted" her after her father took his own life and her mother threw her out. She lived with us, and was supported by my parents fully, from 1975-1982. My parents paid for her therapy, her room and board, my brother's law school, and maragret and evan's first apartments.

Margaret was so wounded by her father's perceived "abandonment", that she was very angry at my own father, as well as being angry at me for "stealing the spotlight" from her by being the only other girl. She has demonstrated her hostility by other actions, such as sending back a necklace i sent her with the name "Maragret" in script, with a note saying she was going to "throw it in the trash." Her daughter informed me that margaret said it was broken. I am looking at both the necklace and the note as I type this. The necklace is not, and never was, broken. it is, however, part of a larger pattern of unprovoked hostility, ill will and either malice or what looks like jealousy. As I have a quick wit and an affable presence, I have attracted many very high status friends, boyfriends, and professional clients, from Daphne Guinness to Cornelia Guest to Shia LaBouef to carey Mulligan, and then some. I believe that myy being engaged to Norman Mailer's youngest son John Buffalo Mailer, a man who seemd both movie-star-handsome AND utterly devoted to me, sent her into a tailspin of helpless rage and envy. perhaps I am wrong. However, I can no longer bear the huge price of one woman's seemingly insatiable vendetta against me. As I had unstable angina a year ago at 48, the chances of my having a second and fatal heart attack within five years, is quite strong. This kind of stress is ACTIVELY unhealthy for me. It also is taking a toll on my mother, who watches me sob about this situation ecvery day.

Thank you for reading this.
I swear that every single word in this, and the statement in it's entirety, is true. Please see notary seal below.
Peri Lyons Thalenberg

2026-03-03T23:56:38.318-05:00

the cat peri lyons c 2011

Love leaves by the window;.

Love sneaks out the door.

i think Love must be somewhere near-

cuz it was here before...

the more you ask Love where its gone;

the more Love cannot say.

the more you tell it to come home-

the more it stays away...

when I was weeping earlier

my Cat jumped from above,

to comfort me: but now I know

who Love reminds me of.

Greatest Hits: Kangaroo Doggerel.

2026-03-03T23:56:38.317-05:00

Psychic Pshenanigans

2026-03-03T23:56:38.316-05:00

Worked twelve hours straight today...thank heavens.

The Psychic Thing, or: Tales from an Astral Vagabond (TM)

2026-03-03T23:56:38.315-05:00

Champagne Wishes, Caviar Dreams, And "Mushi"

2026-03-03T23:56:38.314-05:00

Once upon a time, in a galaxy not quite far far away enough, there was a TV show called, "Lifestyles of the Rich And Famous". Hosted by a suspiciously exuberant Aussie huckster named, appropriately, Robin Leach, it was, essentially, the Semiotics of New Money.

How To Be Psychic (Without Even Trying)

2026-03-03T23:56:38.313-05:00

2026-02-02T22:22:28.044-05:00

Eddie Sebastian, Private Eye

Ed is a twenty year old cat. He is the oddest animal I've ever known.

Ed is,in his mind, many things: a bon vivant, a devil with the ladies, a sculptor, the official greeter for my building, a Fighter of Dogs, and (as we shall see) a major player on the New York Real Estate Scene.
In real life, he is a skinny eunuch with white eyebrows: the rest of him is the exact color orange of the hip leatherette vinyl jackets worn by Starsky and Hutch-type private eyes in 1970's copshows. But he has never let reality bother him: when a pretty lady walks into my apartment, he strolls over to her, his inner Barry White Love Soundtrack obviously playing a seductive disco beat, and then, when she is seated, he lies on his back across one of her feet, the better to show off his belly. "hey baby", he says,"betcha never seen nothin like THIS before, huh?"
The ladies go crazy over him, proving yet again tht confidence is everything. One friend stitched him a heartshaped red pillow stuffed with catnip, with the word "I Love Ed" embroidered on the front in white cursive script. Sometimes he uses it as a pillow, but sometimes I find it under the bookcase, because he likes to prove that no woman can own him, baby. He is a free n easy swinger.

Many years ago, when I was dating some painter, he asked if he could borrow Ed to deal with a sudden mouse problem in the studio. I said "sure." So Ed lived there for a while,intently watching the guy paint and sculpt. Obviously,he took notes, because one night we walked into the studio to find that Ed has made his own site specific piece: he had surrounded the cat food tin on the floor with nine perfectly symmetrical piles of homogenous stufff: one pile of cat fur fluff, one pile of wood shavings, one pile of dry cat food...nine round piles surrounding the cat food can in a circle. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, the goddamndest thing I've ever seen. He trotted up to meet us as we entered, and led us to it, looking back every two seconds to make sure we were following, and then he stood there with an attitude that said, quite clearly, "ta-DAH!"
If I'd been thinking straight, i would have photographed it and then found him a dealer. There might have been a whle different article in the Times today.

When we were living in Carroll gardens, we had an apartment with a landing that had an entrabce to the apartment on either side: it was possible to goout throught the kitchen door and go straight through to the bedroom dooe. One day, Ed scratched at the kitchen door, so he could go exploring. Finding himself on the landing, he went across and scratched on the bedroom dooe. We let him in. He stopped, and stiffened in astonishment. "Hey!" his attitude said. I have ANOTHER apartment, exactly like THIS one! Then he looked at us. "And you guys look just like those OTHER people! This is AMAZING!!" He walked around the entire apartment, his tail a quivering question mark of amazement. He couldn't believe it. Here he was, only three, and yet he owned TWO apartments in a pretty nice section of Brooklyn. AND servants. This was GREAT! He walked up to the kitchen door (which I'd closed) and scratched to be let out, then did the same drill: walked to the bedroom dooe and scratched to be let in, and once again was completely overcome with delight to find that he had...yes..THREE apartments! With servants! In a nice section of Brooklyn! God DAMN! Same inspeaction, same quivering tail....
Since it was a Sunday afternoon with not much on, I decided to see how many times he'd repeat his voyage of Amazing Real Estate discovery. the answer was...eighteen times. Each time he seemed progressively more chuffed. At the end of it all, he turned around three times in a circle, curled up, and went to sleep...for sixteen hours. Hey, real estate mogulhood is TIRING.

Theday we moved into that place, I was piling up boxes and Ed was exploring the fireplace. Suddenly, I heard a "CLANG!" and a black cat I'd never seen before went scooting into the room and hid under the couch. I couldn't understand where the black cat had come from. And where was Ed? When I picked up the noir stranger and my hands turned pitch colored, i got suspicious, and put the intruder under the bathroom tap: as the water ran, he gradually revealed himself to be a ginger cat named Ed, who had figured out how to release the thing on the fireplace that held all the soot back, and got drenched in it. Weirdo.

For ten years, he ahd a ritual that was as ironclad as it was baffling: he did what we called "The Work." Ot started one night not long after we were married: ay three a.m., a series of inexplicable, loud and bizarrely specific noises began issuing from the kitchen. I turned to my spouse. "hey, wake up. I hear something that sounds like someone is tipping over a series of sall marble busts in the kitchen.
the then-spouse awoke, and listened for a moment. "My God, that IS what it sounds like. What the hell?"
I got up, and walking into the kitche, switched on the light, to find Ed sitting there with a "who, me?" expression, he golden eyes wide with completely spurious innocence. "Nothing to see HERE," he intimated. "Certainly no small marble busts. Especially not of Napoleon."
Eyeing him suspiciously, I stood, irresolute, but his innocence convinced me, and I went back to bed.
The next night, 3 a.m., we were awakened by what sounded like someone teaching hamsters to poledance.
"Psst! Wake up!" I nudged my fella.
He sat up, and rubbed his eyes, and listened for a moment. then a strange expression crossed his face. "Is there some sort of hamster strip club around here?" he asked.
'It's Ed!" I hissed. "What is he Doing!"
We listened intently for a moment. Then my hus's face relaxed.
"He is doing...The Work."
"Oh. I think you're right." I had to agree.
"And...the Work Must Continue," he said, and started snoring.
This went on for years. I thought it was just a folie a deux, that all married people had delusions about their pets, until a brother in law staed overnight i the study. In the moening, Pete got up and I found himsearching throught he trash.
"What are you DOING, dude? I made you a nice breakfast, it's on the table, you don't actually forage for scraps, you know."
He muttered "yeah, yeah.." distractedly. the he straightened up and faced me squarely.
Listen," he said, "I could swear I heard someone building a small, dog-powered diriible last night." He looked defiant." I know that sounds crazy.But it was an inexplicable yet very specific noise."
"Oh, THAT," I said, releived. "That was just...The Work."
At that moment, Ed strolled by, tail in the air.
"And, "I continued, "the Work..Must Continue."
"Oh, okay, "said pete. "Then I want coffee."

Many years later, after Ed parols the hallway here twice a day, and greets visitors by officiously showing them the many amenities of the uilding, such as the stairs, the floor, the stairs again and the place where I once dropped a platter of fried chicken (a day that will live forever as a golden memory for Ed), and after he challeneges the two pitbulls who belong to the nice lesbian postal workers on the sixth floor to a duel (thank god Susan, their main walker, has very goodleash control), he comes back in, and after checking to see if there are any ladies aside from me, he sits in his favorite place. the inside of a the base of a wicker stool. It's round and perfect for an old guy to curl up in, and hecan also keep an eye on what's going on, in case pit bulls or Pretty ladies stop by and Action needs to be taken.
These days, he's not as spr as he used to be. I noticed recently that he doesn't hear me when I say "Ed man, I'm home, pal!" and he can't hear the celestial sound of a can openin. Sometimes he falls over, but I always act like I don't see, and he gets up again and starts nonchalantly cleaning the one area on his bod he cleans, a ptch the size of a quarter near his right leg. Pointless, but apparently VERY important.
He has to take medicine, and his eye is a little cloudy, and I think he might be nearing his last days, but he's proved me wrong before. But just in case, some nights I sleep in the floor, because he can't make it up the ladder to the loft bed, and he cries when he feels he is not getting his fair share of attention. he retired from the Work soe four ears ago. Except one night, when my friend Jennifer stayed over, a longtime Pretty Lady friend and admirerer or Ed's.
As I was making coffe in the morning, she said, "Is it possible that someone was teaching mice carpentry here last night? I swear I thought I heard really tiny sawing."
I asked, carefully, "What tie was this, Jenjen?"
She tought for a moment. "Oh...maybe 3 a.m?"

I smiled. The Master had come out of retirement. Like Sinatra, Like Streisnad, like he great masters before him, he always had one last tirck up his sleeve for his admirers.

because..the Work Must Continue.

And so I wrap myself in a blanket on the carpet, solemnly hand Ed his red heartshaped pillow, and we both settle down for a cat nap, dreaming of catnip, fried chicken, and...The Work.

love from me and eddie (and Shirka, the Calico Anvil)
p

2026-02-02T22:22:28.043-05:00

The Pre-Owned Heart

2026-02-02T22:22:28.042-05:00

Talking to a dear friend last night, who lives abroad.

She is in love.

Tales from An Astral Vagabond (TM)

2026-02-02T22:22:28.041-05:00

When I teach my class called "How To Be Psychic Without Even Trying" (http://www.PeriLyonsIntuitive.com, for details on next sessions), I tell the class members to get ready for some serious synchronicity upswings. * -For the new kids in PsychicTown, we'll take a moment here and explain that "synchronicity" is a

2026-02-02T22:22:28.040-05:00

Before I met my friend Mitch, all I knew about him is that other musicians always referred to him, in hushed tones, as "the best living non-Greek bazouki player", which seemed both very specific and a little confusing, especially because I secretly thought a bazouki was a kind of pretty, ornamental show dog.

So when Mitch, on meeting, turned out to

2026-02-02T22:22:28.039-05:00