Jenifer’s Journal: The strangest thing
The above title is flagrantly risky, especially in an age of such unremitting strangeness.
I’m typing this as I await the blizzard we’ve been promised. It will be … what? The fourth, fifth major snowstorm that this 1990’s-throwback winter has produced.
BULLETIN: We interrupt this column to bring you the latest blizzard report. It is now Monday, Feb. 23, 2026, 8:36 a.m., and it’s more like a throwback to the 1890’s out there. As I suspected I might be, I’m camping out at my daughter’s, finishing this opus in her beautifully-appointed playroom. Ah, wilderness! My son-in-law reports gusty winds and 20-inches-and-counting accumulation.
It’s not just this strange “climate-change-back” phenomenon we’re experiencing today — the whole country seems to have become unmoored, climatically and otherwise, in all kinds of ways. Maybe we’re just riding now the high-speed roller coaster our forebears bought a ticket for some 250 years ago when they founded a nation with one foot in slavery and the other in freedom. Strange.
Of course, my generation, the Boomers, the one in which the oldest of us, turning 80 this year, are still being referred to as “Babies,” has been strange from the get-go, born into the high anxiety of the nuclear age, while at the same time being comforted by, up until that time, the hugest thumb ever created for collective sucking: Television. Now our society’s all thumbs: personal computers, cell phones, video games, ChatGPT, artificial intelligence of all kinds, everywhere when we haven’t even scratched the surface of our own.
Granted, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the speed and degree of societal change has escalated. Our grandparents had a lot to contend with, for instance, going from horse-and-buggy to the moon in their lifetime, but those have been exterior changes. They may have altered the pace and predilections of our lives, but they didn’t directly target our inner workings — our values, our emotions, our very brain patterns and who we are as humans.
Like anything worth thinking about, however, change is a paradox. What can seem a radical departure from healthy norms, even from sanity itself, can sometimes result in new ideas, new attitudes, and positive growth. Strange and change do rhyme, after all.
They were certainly rhyming for me this past week. My grandkids have been on Winter Vacation. For Christmas they and their parents had received tickets to “Stranger Things” on Broadway from their generous other-grandma. Their dad, who’s always working, had work to do, so I was the beneficiary of his overarching work ethic.
“Stranger Things” has been a wildly popular Netflix series for several years. This Broadway version sounded to me like forcing a Stephen King horror story into a blender with “Grease.” Apparently, the show’s creators were, indeed, heavily influenced by King’s small-town horror fiction, but I certainly wasn’t too excited to see blood and guts and alien body parts splattered across a Broadway stage. I’m a straight play or classic-musical person myself. But, hey, a free ticket’s a ticket, after all.
Little did I realize, however, that our somewhat uncomfortable journey on a somewhat seedy Jitney would actually be the humble prelude to a strange, 24-hour, outer space adventure.
At our very sleek, Gotham-esque hotel, we were beamed up to the 44th floor in a glass cylinder providing the occupants with a panoramic view and a vertiginous thrill that left some of us bandy-legged as we exited to find our room. Our “suite” was adequate but unremarkable, but as long as it had beds and indoor plumbing, who cared?
As soon as we entered, there they were to greet us like cocktail party-goers crowding towards the guests of honor, building upon building, several rows deep — stocky ones, tall ones, glistening, glowing, circles, squares, triangles, spired, curved, slanted — a multi-colored congregation meeting us eye-to-eye. I’m a provincial — my standard Big Apple POV is ground-level, looking up — until then. And it was still daylight!
By the time we were seated and slowly revolving (without queasiness!) at our table in the excellent restaurant on the 48th floor, the buildings were dressed for the evening, their millions of lights glittering all around us. Oh, I may be a cheap date, but it was, to me, strange, exotic and glorious. The show before the show!
And then, having taken the cosmic plunge to the theatre, which was right there on the third floor, we sat five rows back from the stage (a situation which, until that moment, I would’ve avoided like the plague) and basically became part of the performance which, at any other time, might’ve proved seizure-inducing: high-decibel screams, explosions, rock’n’roll music, airborne monsters and impossible feats of prestidigitation. And the strangest thing? I loved it all.
But, now, how am I going to get home to my cats?
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