Late on a sun-baked October afternoon in 1995, an attractive, 60-ish woman named Jodine Lesieur drove home after a long day cutting hair in her busy Laytonville barber shop. She turned west at the CDF…
Posts tagged as “essays”
And then there’s Bali, a name of guaranteed glamour, known to all. Before the Second World War, I had heard of incomparable Bali from aristocrats of travel—those who could pay for the expensive journey— and…
After three weeks on the road, 3,000+ miles by rail on AMTRAK and 4,996 driven in a rental car what did we learn wandering around Americas in mid-summer? It’s green, it rains, and there is…
It’s a hot quiet weekday morning in Falls City, Oregon, which is more of a town than a city, at least by the standards of a northern Californian who has lived in Santa Rosa and…
San Francisco, to me, is like a house of cards: postcards in glowing colors stacked against the hills that march from the Bay on one side to the Pacific Ocean on the other. The real…
What does Barbie sound like? The original doll’s blonde hair, pointed toes and pointed breasts define her look, but her voice was, until the sing-song-then-sadistic vocals of Jodi Benson in Toy Story 3 of 2010…
In 1960 daily journalism was still a competitive enterprise in San Francisco. The Chronicle and the Examiner were slugging it out for the city’s breakfast table readership and a good time was being had by…
For a while it looked as though the Sixties had been captured by the enemy, its history decorously re-edited by people like Todd Gitlin. Anyone who wants to get a sense of the real thing…