Asked to a recent wedding in Virginia (it was a family affair on a grand scale), the proud parents asked if I would do some sort of officiation. It would be my second inning in…
Posts published in “Essays”
Down South people think all Californians are either gay or work in Hollywood; we forgive them as they forgive us for believing all southerners are racist, uneducated redneck brutes. Caricatures of our fellow citizens are…
Official Mendocino County is awfully slow to adjust to contemporary realities, as the startling ordeal of a gay Ukiah man named Marc Tosca illustrates. In December of 1990, Tosca and his late partner, Harry Kirkpatrick,…
In one of her best-known songs, Tina Turner, the “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” asks, “What’s love got to do with it?” For Che “it” was everything. His second wife, Aleida March, provides much the…
Often when I practice the organ I’m immersed in the immediacy of each successive moment of music-making. Act and sound conjoin in the uninterrupted present. The best concert performances remain in that heightened state, but…
How did we go from hippies sucking on the Green Nipple in the Roaring Eighties to the scene today with large legal pot plantations, surviving mainly by breaking the rules and selling weed on the…
Many seasons ago I was dragged into service by a softball team I’d never heard of to play a position I’d never played. It went poorly. For the second time in my life I was…
I was midway into my first cup of coffee one long-ago morning when my 16-year-old daughter plopped her one-gloved self (it was the height of Michael Jackson mania) down at the kitchen table and informed…
Memories of Wolf Creek are etched in my mind forever. I will never forget my first trip. We drove north from Boonville through the giant redwoods. The bright day almost turned to night as the…