Jan Brady is not the only one who hated being in the middle. This week we have stories about how it sucks to be in limbo or be the mediator, but we also hear from a man who absolutely loves being in that uncertain and boring middle most of us dread — on hold, listening to hold music.
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Prologue
Do You Hear What I Hear?
Sara Corbett's father-in-law Dick is 81. And he's become obsessed with a limbo most of us hate – the music he hears whenever he's on hold. Sara is co-author of the book A House in the Sky.
Here is the hold music, Opus No. 1.
Song:
Sunrise, Sun-Get
Mark Oppenheimer reports on agunah in the Orthodox Jewish community. An agunah is a woman whose husband refuses to give her a divorce – in Hebrew it means "chained wife." If you're an Orthodox Jew, strictly following Jewish law, the only real way to get divorced is if your husband agrees to hand you a piece of paper called a get. Without the get, women who want out of their marriages can stay chained to their husbands for years. In New York, a couple of rabbis were recently accused of using violence to force men to give their wives a get. Mark writes the Beliefs column for The New York Times.
They Love a Man in a Uniform
Sarah Carr is a reporter and blogger in Cairo, Egypt. Her blog inanities.org is regularly cited as one of Egypt's best blogs and English language news sources coming out of Egypt. She tells us what things are like in Egypt during their middle period – the transitional phase that started three years ago when people took to the streets, eventually resulting in the army ousting Hosni Mubarak after 30 years of authoritarian rule.
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