Moon Over Mandalay

Can a young musician from Canada find happiness in Indiana in the Seventies?

Moon Over Mandalay, a light-hearted battle of the sexes, plays out against a backdrop of the just-passed sixties, the pervasive whiff of marijuana and sounds of The Beatles, The Who, the Grateful Dead. About the pursuit of one’s dreams, love and romance, Moon Over Mandalay allows us a deliciously funny, yet forgiving, peek at our human follies.

A WRITER AND PIANIST, Rhoda Rabinowitz-Green was born in Philadelphia and raised in Camden, New Jersey. Shaped by the mores of the fifties — the "quiet generation" — and affected by the restrictive attitudes of the times toward the role of women, she matured as a young woman, wife, and mother during the revolutionary changes of the sixties and early seventies, the period reflected in Moon Over Mandalay. The struggle for identity, for fulfilment, the tug between commitment to career and love, are persistent themes in her writing. She attended Temple University (B.S.Mus.) and Indiana University, Bloomington (M.Mus.). In 1968, after some years performing and teaching, she immigrated to Canada. There, her interests turned to language and language acquisition: she studied creative writing at York University, worked with novelists Janette Turner Hospital and Helen Weinzweig, taught ESL in Toronto public schools, and began writing in the 1980s. Rhoda has been published in journals in Canada and the U.S. and on the Web. Her stories have appeared in Fireweed, Parchment, Dandelion, The Fiddlehead, Sistersong, Jewish Currents, and The Louisville Review. Her story, "The Day of the Gorgon" (Jewish Currents), was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. "Aspects of Nature" (The Louisville Review) was a finalist in the Writers' Union of Canada 1994 Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers.