Read the Mrs. Lieutenant Blog Post About Rape

Today is one of those days when I'm directing you to my Mrs. Lieutenant blog because the subject of the post -- rape -- and the actually uplifting message of the www.YourMilitaryLife.com interview of Eldonna Lewis Fernandez are topics that I want to share with my PZ the Do-Gooder Scrooge blog readers.

Read the Mrs. Lieutenant blog post now.
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Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL and the co-author of the Jewish holiday book SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION. She also blogs at Mrs. Lieutenant and Operation Support Jews in the Military, and she is the co-host of the BlogTalkRadio show Your Military Life. Her company Miller Mosaic LLC builds call-to-action websites for book authors and small businesses.

PZ the Do-Gooder Scrooge Gets a Do-Gooder Certificate of Appreciation

For those of you who read this blog regularly, you know that I like to highlight people and organizations that "do good." So I was pleasantly surprised when Lindsey Brothers submitted my name for the U.S. Army Freedom Team Salute Certificate of Appreciation.

Read about my getting this Freedom Team Salute.
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Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL and the co-author of the Jewish holiday book SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION. She also blogs at Mrs. Lieutenant and Operation Support Jews in the Military, and she is the co-host of the BlogTalkRadio show Your Military Life. Her company Miller Mosaic LLC builds call-to-action websites for book authors and small businesses.

Homes for Our Troops Builds Homes for Badly Wounded Veterans

I just learned about Home for Our Troops through a Facebook message I got from Goli Motar. The organization has a heartwarming mission, and the fundraising effort that Goli writes about is also rather amazing.

Please read Goli's Facebook message on my Mrs. Lieutenant blog to learn more.
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Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL and the co-author of the Jewish holiday book SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION. She also blogs at Mrs. Lieutenant and Operation Support Jews in the Military, and she is the co-host of the BlogTalkRadio show Your Military Life. Her company Miller Mosaic LLC builds call-to-action websites for book authors and small businesses.

Kiva.org Facilitates Micro-Lending in the Developing World

In the recent guest blog post "Mico-Economics: How to Win the War in Afghanistan" for my Mrs. Lieutenant blog, Andrew Lubin explained how very small investments can make huge differences in Afghanistan.

Yesterday I came across the organization Kiva.org that facilitates micro-lending in the developing world. Here's the site's explanation of how it works:

Choose an Entrepreneur, Lend, Get Repaid

1) Lenders like you browse profiles of entrepreneurs in need, and choose someone to lend to. When they lend, using PayPal or their credit cards, Kiva collects the funds and then passes them along to one of our microfinance partners worldwide.

2) Kiva's microfinance partners distribute the loan funds to the selected entrepreneur. Often, our partners also provide training and other assistance to maximize the entrepreneur's chances of success.

3) Over time, the entrepreneur repays their loan. Repayment and other updates are posted on Kiva and emailed to lenders who wish to receive them.

4) When lenders get their money back, they can re-lend to someone else in need, donate their funds to Kiva (to cover operational expenses), or withdraw their funds.

Read Andrew Lubin's guest post and then check out Kiva.org to see if there's a micro-project in which you're interested in investing.

TV Show Grey's Anatomy Deals with PTSD

I rarely send readers of this blog to my Mrs. Lieutenant blog. Yet yesterday's guest post by my younger daughter Yael covers such an important topic -- Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder -- that I do want to share her post with the readers of this blog.

Read Yael's PTSD guest post connecting Homer's THE ILIAD, Vietnam and Grey's Anatomy, and then share the post with anyone you think may be in need of this important information.

Martin Luther King Day, Barack Obama and MRS. LIEUTENANT

In honor of Martin Luther King Day and the Presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, I'm sharing with the readers of this blog the children's picture book story I wrote after the Presidential elections in November. This is a "continuation" of the story of Wendy, the African-American character in my novel MRS. LIEUTENANT that takes place in 1970:

Rosemary woke early on the morning of November 5th. Today she turned seven years old. But her mother and father hadn’t yet come into her room to wake her and sing happy birthday. She knew they had stayed up late the night before, celebrating that an African-American man had been elected President of the United States.

Rosemary slid her feet into her bunny slippers and skipped down the hall to her parents’ bedroom. Pushing open the door, she saw they were still asleep.

Rosemary took a flying leap and landed on the bed between her parents.

“Wake up! It’s my birthday!” she said.

Her mother woke up first. She smiled and kissed Rosemary. “So it is. You’re seven years old today.”

Her father pulled on the loose end of one of Rosemary’s pigtails. “You got an early special birthday present yesterday when Barack Obama won,” he said.

At breakfast Rosemary and her parents read the newspapers announcing the Presidential win. “He’s not there on his own,” her father said. “He has a lot of people who went before him to thank.”

“I know,” Rosemary said. “Martin Luther King Jr. led the fight for our rights.”

“There were others too,” her father said. “You know the story about Rosa Parks in 1955 starting the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama.”

“Were you there?” Rosemary asked her parents, who laughed at her question.

“No, honey, we’re not that old,” her mother said. “But your grandmother was just your age in 1955.”

“Did she boycott the buses too?” Rosemary asked.

“No, she lived in a different Southern state. But her parents protected her from racial prejudice.”

Rosemary frowned for a moment, trying to understand what her mother meant.

“How did they do that?”

Her mother took Rosemary’s hand. “When your grandmother comes to dinner tonight for your birthday, ask her.”


That evening Rosemary put on her favorite dress and waited near the front door for her grandmother to arrive. When her grandmother entered the house, Rosemary jumped up and down in front of her.

“Grandmama, tell me about growing up in the South. Did you have to sit at the back of the bus like Rosa Parks?”

Her grandmother shook her head, then sat down on the sofa and motioned for Rosemary to sit in her grandmother’s lap.

“Oh, Rosemary, I had a very unusual life growing up in the South. But today I’d rather tell you another story. Because next week is Veterans Day, when we honor the men and women who have served in our military forces. And you know that your grandfather was in the army during the Vietnam War.”

Rosemary nodded, although she had never known this grandfather. “What story do you want to tell me about?”

“The story when your grandfather first went on active duty in May of 1970. He was an officer and he had to attend armor school at Ft. Knox, Kentucky.”

Rosemary tugged on her grandmother’s hand. “What’s armor school?”

“Armor is tanks. An armor officer trains on leading tanks into battle.”

Her grandmother paused for a moment, brushing her hand across her eyes. Then she continued. “We had to live in a trailer because people wouldn’t rent to us. I thought I would have to spend all nine weeks alone by myself. But something funny happened.”

“What, Grandmama? What happened?”

“There was a training program for the wives too. And I got to be on the entertainment committee. There was a white woman from Chicago – she was the chair of the entertainment committee. She wrote a little play for the wives’ graduation luncheon and we got together and practiced the play.”

“Was it a good play?”

Her grandmother laughed. “Lord, I don’t know. But we had fun practicing. And it made those of us on the committee into friends.”

“Were the other women on the committee also white?”

Her grandmother nodded. “Yes, there was a Southern who didn’t much like blacks – that’s the polite word we were called in those days. And there was a Puerto Rican.”

Her grandmother looked at Rosemary. “Do you know where Puerto Rico is?”

“Yes, Grandmama. It’s in the Caribbean near Cuba.”

From the kitchen Rosemary could hear the sounds of her parents preparing her birthday dinner. She hoped they would take more time, because she wanted to hear more of her grandmother’s story.

“What happened to the other women?”

Her grandmother shook her head. “I don’t know. At the end of the nine weeks we all went to our husbands’ next duty station. But for me those nine weeks had been an amazing experience. It was the first time I had been friends with white folks. It gave me confidence that I would be okay in the white world.”

At that moment Rosemary’s mother walked into the living room. “Good evening, Mother,” Rosemary’s mother said to Rosemary’s grandmother. “I just heard what you were talking to Rosemary about.”

Rosemary’s mother stopped in front of Rosemary’s grandmother and held out a book. “I have a surprise for you even though it is Rosemary’s birthday. I’ve just read a new book that I think is about you.”

Rosemary watched her grandmother take the book and look at the cover photos of four women – one of them an African-American. “Mrs. Lieutenant: A Sharon Gold Novel by Phyllis Zimbler Miller” her grandmother read aloud. Then she turned over the book and read from the back cover:

“In the spring of 1970 four newly married young women come together at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, when their husbands go on active duty as officers in the U.S. Army.

“Different as these four women are, they have one thing in common: Their overwhelming fear that, right after these nine weeks of training, their husbands could be shipped out to Vietnam – and they could become war widows.

“Sharon is a Northern Jewish anti-war protester who fell in love with an ROTC cadet; Kim is a Southern Baptist whose husband is intensely jealous: Donna is a Puerto Rican who grew up in an enlisted man’s family; and Wendy is a Southern black whose parents have sheltered her from the brutal reality of racism in America.”

As Rosemary’s grandmother read those last words, Rosemary’s grandmother gasped. “Oh my heavens, you’re right. Someone has written our story.”

Rosemary saw the tears gathering in the corners of her grandmother’s eyes. Rosemary took her grandmother’s hand and said, “It’s okay, Grandmama. We’ve come a long way since then.”

Her grandmother smiled at her. “Yes we have.” She paused for a moment and squeezed Rosemary’s hand. “And your grandfather would be so proud of America today.”

Spirit of America Partners With Soldier in Afghanistan

Something amazing has happened since I wrote a post on my Mrs. Lieutenant blog on December 23rd about a single soldier deployed in Kabul who was requesting donations of blankets to prevent Afghan children from actually freezing to death in the brutal winters.

In that post I mentioned that my husband had told me that Spirit of America was an American organization that supported efforts by U.S. personnel stationed in places like Afghanistan to help the civilian population. And I sent the blog post to Spirit of America after finding a contact email on the website.

A couple of days ago I got an email from the program director at Spirit of America saying that the organization was going to contact the soldier and send $300 worth of blankets. I was so excited that I wrote a second Mrs. Lieutenant blog post about this.

And then I got another email from the organization's executive director saying Spirit of America was increasing its donation to $1500 for blankets and the school supplies that the soldier now also requested. I have to admit my eyes filled with tears when I read this second email.

I wanted to share this generosity of Spirit of America with you, and to tell you that the soldier has now also requested gently used children's clothes. His return to the U.S. has been pushed back from April to September, so he'll be in Afghanistan longer and will have more time to help the people there.

Here's part of the email that the soldier -- Specialist Gerardo Llamas -- has just sent out to people interested in helping with his project:

I have partnered up with a great organization that is helping me get more donations as well as helping with shipping charges. You can see the ad they have posted for me here. They are great and hopefully I can reach a lot more people and make this project a huge one. I want it to make a huge difference in the lives of these people, the people of Afghanistan. If you are interested in helping by donating blankets, clothes or school supplies, you can do it directly through me, like before, or you can do it through Spirit of America.

If you would like to help this effort, please go to the Spirit of America page for this project.

College Applications: The Paradox of Having to Write Well Even If You're a Math Major

I've been contemplating the paradox of college application essays. Regardless of what your planned college major may be, if you want a good chance of getting into a top college -- besides having high SAT scores and a high GPA you have to be able to write well. Because how well an applicant writes his/her college application essays can have a significant impact on that applicant's acceptances.

Given this paradox, I'm pondering how well high school seniors are prepared to write good college application essays and how prepared they are to write good college course papers. And I'm also pondering whether, a few years from now, college applicants will not be required to write college application essays. Instead they'll submit a YouTube video answering the essay questions. Or provide their own password-protected websites.

As a writer, I find it discouraging that writing skills will become less important in the future. And that said, I'm off to do more social media networking to promote my novel MRS. LIEUTENANT.

(At 9 p.m. Eastern time tonight I'm going to be a guest on the BlogTalkRadio show Urban Literary Review. You'll be able to listen to the interview later if you can't catch the show live.)

USO Revisited: Supporting Our Troops

Here's how my Mrs. Lieutenant blog post begins today:

I have to admit that the first thought that comes to my mind when I think of the USO is scenes of USO-sponsored dances in World War II films. So I found the email from the USO asking for a donation particularly moving as it included the text of a letter from a wife whose husband was deployed to Iraq:

I hope you'll find the rest of the post interesting -- read it at http://mrslieutenant.blogspot.com/2008/10/uso-supporting-troops-every-wife-dreads.html.

And if you're a celebrity performer, please consider performing for our troops.

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World War II Veteran: My Father Albert Zimbler

As I announced in my previous post, I'm sponsoring through the Facebook group MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL the event Honor a Veteran in recognition of Veterans Day on November 11 at http://snipurl.com/mrslieutenant.

Spread the word about this event -- five people (chosen through random.org) will receive prizes for participating. I want to encourage people to Honor a Veteran.

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Read About a Combat Veteran and Support Operation Soldier Care

If you usually don’t read my Mrs. Lieutenant blog posts, I urge you to read this one at http://tinyurl.com/5wtace. It’s a compelling story of someone risking his life to “do good.”

And the post is also a request to help others who are “doing good” by being in harm’s way.

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OPERATION SOLDIER CARE HAS MATCHING SPONSOR TO SUPPORT OUR TROOPS

August is in full force through the U.S. with record heat waves keeping people inside in front of their air conditioners.

Imagine, then, how hot and uncomfortable U.S. men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan must be! And also imagine how nice it would be for them to receive sun/skin care products that can make their lives a tad easier.

Thanks to Trish Forant of www.eMailOurMilitary.com and Nancy Sutherland, sales director of Mary Kay, OPERATION SOLDIER CARE is providing sun/skin care products to deployed service members to help relieve the ravages of a desert combat tour.

What started as a smaller project has now grown to a larger one due to Nancy’s offer to match all contributions up to $5,000. This is, in effect, a 2-for-1 offer where every purchased Mary Kay gift set results in Nancy buying a matching second gift set.

Show support for our deployed troops by stepping up to the plate and buying Mary Kay gift sets. Click on this link to Nancy’s Mary Kay website to buy the gift sets of satin hand pampering -- http://tinyurl.com/5dmwq4. After putting in the number of sets, put OPERATION SOLDIER CARE in the comment section at checkout and your gifts will be sent directly to the soldiers.

It’s that easy! So click on http://tinyurl.com/5dmwq4 now because this troop support project ends August 18.

And to encourage you to buy multiple gift sets, the top five biggest individual donors will receive a copy of the new book MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL by Phyllis Zimbler Miller and an eMail Our Military 15-oz. ceramic coffee mug.

Why not consider this as a great summer project for scouts or camps to pitch in to help our troops? Let’s show them that we care!

Operation Soldier Care, www.emailourmilitary.com, Nancy Sutherland, Trish Forant, Mary Kay, Mrs. Lieutenant, do-gooder, Scrooge

Rona Jaffe’s Novel THE BEST OF EVERYTHING and My Novel MRS. LIEUTENANT

Amazon “Top 500 Reviewer” Dr. Cathy Goodwin said in part in her review of MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL:

As I read, I was reminded of Rona Jaffe's classic, The Best of Everything, made into a movie that captured the 50s era career woman.

What Jaffe did for the college graduate in publishing, Miller does for the Vietnam era junior officer's wife.

I have to admit that I had never heard of the book (which was first published when I was 10) or the 1959 movie based on the book. Of course I clicked on Amazon and bought the book.

The novel starts in 1952, the year I was four, my brother two, and my parents got their first car and their first television. The book’s depiction of all career women as just waiting till they could hook some man and give up their job depressed me. I’m not saying this wasn’t true then, just that it depressed me.

Years ago in Philadelphia at the Norman Rockwell Museum I saw the cover of a Saturday Evening Post illustrated by his artwork. The date of the issue was some time after 1945. And the title of one of the issue’s featured articles announced on the cover went something like this: Now that the men have returned can the girls keep their jobs?

Those words “can the girls keep their jobs” have always haunted me. I had read somewhere that, in the second half of the 1940s, there was a concerted propaganda campaign to get women who’d worked during WWII to return to their places at home.

And this propaganda campaign meant that those of us who were early feminists had to spend the 1970s fighting for our place in the workforce. I won’t repeat here the things I was told as a Mrs. Lieutenant as to why I couldn’t have a job. Or what was said to me in job interviews when I returned to civilian life.

I do know that, when I taught newswriting courses at Temple University Center City in the mid-1970s, I had to first overcome the prejudices of both male and female students towards women. Only then could I get these students to report about women in the same neutral tones that they reported about men.

(I’ll never forget when a front-page Wall Street Journal article, talking about a woman, said “the blond” did such and such. In those days I had quite a collection of newspaper clippings featuring derogatory portrayals of women.)

So while I very much appreciate the good review that Goodwin gave to MRS. LIEUTENANT, I do hope that my portrayal of the wives of four junior army officers in 1970 was not as one-sided as Rona Jaffe’s portrayal of young “career” women in the early 1950s.

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Donorschoose.org – Unique Wedding Guest Gift

I’ve just returned from the Philadelphia wedding of my nephew. It was a lovely, lovely wedding, and I cried as the bride and groom stood under the chupah. Yet I also cried much later in the evening – while a fantastic band played – when I opened the wedding guest gift:

Each guest received a gift certificate for $18 (in Hebrew 18 represents chai – life) to www.donorschoose.org – a nonprofit website where “public school teachers submit proposals for materials or experiences their students need to learn.” And then donations bring these dreams to life.

At the wedding I talked to my nephew about the gift certificates. He said he and his bride-to-be had been thinking of giving each guest a $10 gift when they realized what they could do with a different kind of wedding guest gift.

This morning I went to www.donorschoose.org/gift to redeem my gift certificate. There were so many good projects from which to choose. Yet, as a book author, I was drawn to the following project (underlining mine):

Pushing Our Way into Literacy: Book Carts For the Classroom

Last week was Teen Read Week. The media specialist and I created a book cart around the theme Get Active and visited 28 classrooms during the week. With each class, we did a book pass of books we thought would be high interest reads for the students and then allowed them to check out books. During the week, there was a 280% increase in the number of books checked out. We received an overwhelmingly positive response from the staff as well, who reported that for the first time their students were reading.

We would now like to purchase a number of carts to create themed book mobiles for teachers to check out. We know that reading comprehension is the most critical component of student education, and placing high interest reads into the hands of our kids is the key to developing that comprehension.

I need two book carts to enable me to provide high interest young adult reading materials to the students in my school. The cost of this proposal is $833, which includes shipping for any materials requested and fulfillment.

When I submitted my gift certificate to this project, I was asked to comment for the website on why this particular project. Here’s my reply:

I gave to this project because I'm the author of a book MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL and I believe reading books is vital in the acquiring of reading skills.

PZ the Do-Gooder Scrooge recommends that – when giving out gifts for various occasions – consider following the example of my nephew and his bride: Give gift certificates to www.donorschoose.org.

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Social Media: Helping Others on a Global Platform

Social media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. – are internet platforms, I’ve learned, that fit with my personality. I’ve been listening to several free teleseminars this week about using the internet for business purposes. One main theme is that you have to give and give before you get.

What does this mean? Simply that you have to interact with the social media communities of which you’re a part, be genuine, and give away valuable information. Eventually, as Mary Pat Kavanagh of www.queenofmarketing.com says, people will do business with you because people do business with people they know, like and trust.

This is great for me because I always love to give people information. If I learn of something and I know someone who would be especially interested in that piece of information, I call or email the person. I truly believe that we should all try to help each other without waiting to be asked.

I admit this attitude can cause friction with my husband. If I pass someone on the street in Beverly Hills looking at a map, I’ll stop and ask if the person needs help. My husband will complain that I’m interfering – the person didn’t ask for help. But how many of us are uncomfortable asking for help, especially from a stranger?

What I always try to bear in mind is: What would I want to happen if I were the one standing there with the map? Of course I’d want someone to volunteer to help me.

Natural Information Provider

That’s why this expectation in social media of giving is so right for my personality – I’m a natural information provider.

And I’ve been on a personal intensive quest for the last few months to learn as much as possible about internet marketing. The quest started in connection with promoting my new book MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL. Now the quest has continued in preparation for promoting the material I’ve written as part of my FLIPPING BURGERS AND BEYOND philosophy for teens and young adults.

In the meantime, I’m always happy to answer questions about internet marketing. The internet world is so huge that there’s room for all of us. No need to keep our information to ourselves – we can all put our information out there to help others.

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