Many people subscribe to the theory that we all have a set point for our weights. You can lose a great deal on a drastic diet, but your body will naturally find its way back to the “set weight” that’s pre-determined by your DNA, metabolism, and the rest. It might be smart to accept your weight set-point if the alternative is a roller coaster of dieting and rebounding. But that’s not the set-point of interest to me right now. There is another kind of set-point which intrigues me as a storyteller and creator of characters, and that’s the character’s personality
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A while back I took a wine tasting class. It was fun and I learned some interesting things about wine. The teacher, a sommelier, instructed us to trust ourselves and to enjoy the fact that tastes and aromas are experienced by individuals in individual ways. I might sniff raspberries in the aroma of a red wine; and you might smell black cherries. Neither of us is wrong. The chemical portrait of that aroma reads as raspberries to me and cherries to you. It might impress someone else as a noxious cough syrup aroma or a heavenly blackberry. No one is
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I was at the Morgan Library—a wonderful small New York City Museum centered around J.P. Morgan’s library, personal study and art collection, plus marvelous rooms for the display of Art. It was my second visit to the current exhibition of works on paper. Great art can be inspiring and engrossing, so when another museum visitor kept calling out “Susan!” I was perturbed and then annoyed. I thought, “Susan, go find your friend.” A while later, the woman searching for Susan approached me, “Are you Susan?”          “No.”          “You look so much like her and…”          “It’s the hair.”         
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