I was getting ice cream at the Baskin-Robbins at Pear Tree, feeling a little uncomfortable and out of place. Ice cream parlors, with their brightly-lit, colorful interiors and excited children milling around experiencing the pre-sexual…
Posts published in “Essays”
As a historian in the midst of writing a 150 year history of Mendocino County I spend a lot of time reading the first county history printed in 1880. In this tome there is nothing…
Jerry Springer: The Opera closed a week ago on Broadway after a three-month run. Given the show’s crazed, megalomaniacal, helmet-haired title character, and its diverse tableaux that ranges from Jesus-on-the-cross to tap-dancing Klansmen and other…
The deputy mounted, shook himself down into the saddle, then stood in the stirrups. 'Raise the blind,' Standley called. The mule took on his favorite jackknife position. Doc described it this way, “With little resistance,…
The Monday Morning Meeting With The Mayor (MMMM) just did not work out for me. The Mayor informed me by email of the error of my ways. “The Monday morning meeting with the mayor was never intended to be a press conference. You somehow fail to grasp that,” boomed Mayor Lindy Peters.
I am a big fan of irony, as a literary device. I enjoy its use by writers and I employ it liberally myself virtually every, time I put pen to paper. Saying what you mean,…
The headline on Robert O'Connell's New York Times piece March 27, "Baseball's Unappreciated Power Duo," referred to Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard. The piece begins: "Baseball’s great power partnerships range from the foundational (Babe Ruth and Lou…
In the final pages of Charles Burney’s massive four-volume General History of Music published between 1776 and 1789 and the first of its kind written in English, there appears an elegy for an instrument that…
One of the first things I learned as an elected official many years ago was that citizen-voters have very modest expectations of officeholders and the bureaucrats who carry out their decisions. That’s certainly the case…