The Eurovision Song Contest has long burst the geographically borders seemingly staked out by its name. Yet the international spectacle hardly makes a blip on America’s collective consciousness or its screens. Other countries even farther…
Posts published in “Essays”
What was so ineffably cool about the Twilight Zone was: most of the time, it was regular people moving around in the regular, recognizable world—a very 1950s world, mostly—going about their regular business, when a…
I am an inveterate tree hugger, a hugger of oak, fir, pine, eucalyptus, hickory and cedar which I first hugged as a boy growing up on the edge of a hardwood forest long gone to…
America's most enduring political figure now lives in slow motion. Hampered by bad hips, she walks at a glacial pace, usually gripping the arms of two aides who lead the way, her legs flopping around…
‘Tried to give away, turn in, that is, her wallet. Eager to surrender, ready to submit. No use, though. Why’d I ever pick the orphan bastard up? You’d’ve done the same. Pigskin peeking from dense…
Sal Maglie: Baseball’s Demon Barber by Judith Testa, Northern Illinois University Press, 2007; 463 pages. It took an art historian from a midwestern college to give Sal Maglie the biography he deserved. The subject seems…
Marie the mystery woman was so much the mystery woman it was hard to find out her last name, but it was Helmey, Marie Helmey, the older lady in the long black coat with a…
During a three hour mid-day meal at the Bewildered Pig last month Floriane and Arnaud Weyrich told me the tale of how they migrated to our Valley, raised a family, and upon retrospect found very…
Where exactly did this disrespect for authority, this all-around cheekiness, come from? Well, between prime 50s TV guys like Groucho Marx and Allen Funt, what would you expect? “You Bet Your Life” and “Candid Camera”…