As he approached his 70th year, the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright endured a bout of pneumonia during a Wisconsin winter. “You could add 20…
Posts published in “Essays”
In the Grimm brother’s Snow White the Queen gazes into the magic mirror that never lies and vainly asks: “Magic mirror in my hand, who…
Panic set in not for the obvious reasons: the blinding white stone of the Capitol dome, ramparts and columns resembling nothing so much as Albert…
Here's what I've learned about doing time: you can't do years. Well, in retrospect you can, easily — that is, after you've done 'em. They're…
Staying with friends was the only way I could afford to make my trip to New York in 1976 last more than a week or so, and I wanted to stay in or near Manhattan for at least three weeks. When I left for New York, I thought I had two places to stay, one in Newark, New Jersey with Dan and Janka, and one on West 83rd Street in Manhattan with Scott and Richard, but when Janka’s mother learned I was planning to stay in the area for several weeks, she invited me to use the guest room in her apartment on West 94th Street, three blocks from Central Park.
Each summer during the 70s, there were basketball camps which sprung up in the frozen windy tundra tri-state areas of Minnesota, Nebraska and Iowa (the…
Two items from the first week in January that barely registered faint blips on the media radar: First, Huell Howser has died. If he is…
I saw an old-school “punk rocker” on the street the other day — one with the full spiked-out mohawk hairstyle, in addition to the beat-up,…
In 1976, when I was twenty-six and working as a landscaper in southern Oregon, my big dream was go to New York and meet my literary agent Dorothy Pittman for the first time, and also say hello to the magazine editors at Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, and Gallery who had bought my short stories; and to rub shoulders, I hoped, with others of my kind.