There is nothing like an unanticipated dance scene on stage or screen: the twist contest in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (an homage to, among other cinematic choreographies, Godard’s Bande à part); in spite its cheezy intercutting,…
Posts published in “Essays”
I went into Adventist, Ukiah, a week ago last Tuesday — and stayed four days. If you know anyone needing gut surgery I so recommend Portuguese, Dr. Aroujo of Adventist, Ukiah. He came with good…
Jonathan Allen of NBC News got a big scoop August 20 when he ran into Dennis Rodman in a Washington, DC eatery. Rodman was in town for a sneaker convention. Allen reported, "Former NBA player…
Karen Alveen Mathes was born in Oakland, California, June 24, 1951, to Aili and Joseph Mathes, the oldest of five children. She grew up in the Mountain View-Sunnyvale area back when it was semi-rural. Her…
I had visited Susan Stubblefield’s grave in Evergreen Cemetery numerous times, had heard about this early Valley settler’s memoirs for years and finally got around to reading them last month while working on the Aunt…
Dr. Anthony Fauci announced this week that he will be retiring as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a position that he has held since 1984. I have great respect…
We were just shy of two weeks and two-hundred miles into a walk across northern England, from the Cumbrian seaside town of St. Bees on the island’s West Coast to Robin Hood’s Bay on the…
When Laura Hopper was a kid, her mother had a friend who lived in a tree. “And I thought he was the coolest thing ever,” Hopper said of the man who lived in the woods…
After ninety minutes of winding, narrow, and tedious backcountry roads without an English-speaking voice on the car radio, we endured a period of silence, the kind perhaps that is inevitable when traveling in close quarters…