Category Archives: Uncategorized

“Truly, my mother was a hard, hard act to follow. Her black chignon, her enormous hats, her flawless, Charles-of-the-Ritz make-up, her back-seamed stockings, their seams razor-straight, her high, high-heeled pumps, her three (never more) pieces of good jewelry . . . .  And then, there was her daughter, who would not sit still, and whose […]

“Like an ancient map, its spirit roads in the visible realm can, effectively, never be found. A dish, about the size to fill two slightly cupped hands. Narrow, vaguely circular, disappearing from not only view but from longing itself, into the pinkish shadows beyond the treehouse, a kind of context it carries as an outer […]

“You have likely heard this expression: We learn from our mistakes. The process of science assures that we—at least some of us—will continue along an educational path, up to and until we are no longer able capable of making relevant observations. At some point, of course, we will die and our species will go extinct. […]

“Didi found me a small pension in Calenzana, a nearby village notorious for being a center of the Union Corse and the white slave trade. ‘How can you go there on your own,’ friends would exclaim. ‘You’ll be abducted by your straight blonde hair and whisked off to Saudi Arabia!’”—Diana Farr Louis Eating Well Is […]

“Today, after many classes where I was advised to think of each dance as a ‘three-minute love affair,’ and after scores of hours practicing in a studio, not to mention many, many nights out on the floor dancing to live swing bands, I have come a long way. In the beginning, my teachers referred to […]

“Growing up on the island of Mykonos in the 1960s, my brother and I were the only blond and blue-eyed children in sight. In fact, we were among the very first foreigners to live on the island. Our shared nickname was, simply, ‘The Americans.’ As far back as I can remember, I was always desperately […]

“I admit that I’m among the first to collect bad news to share with my wife and classes, but I do not feel that the Sermon on the Mount is on the rocks, either. I also collect the good news, as when the journalist-lawyer Steven Brill, pretending to be a wealthy but lost foreign tourist, […]

“As a former journalist (or, rather, recovering journalist), I still retain some sleuthing chops, but I must admit that I have not been able to discover any salient details about Weekly Hubris’s resident single-panel cartoonist, Mark Addison Kershaw. I haunt (a term of art) his Facebook page for clues, though, and have recently inferred that […]

“she brought me coffee in the rain   and later   in pink pajamas and slip on slippers   she entered heaven   where i was   painting the doors white   keep painting   she rattled   ruffling her papers   then began reading ferlinghetti’s    i am waiting    i turned down the […]

“People say, what does it matter? It’s harmless. The Queen is only a figurehead. It brings in the tourists. But she is more than a figurehead. Every piece of potential legislation that may affect ‘The Firm,’ as they call themselves, has to have royal consent. The monarchy costs the taxpayer £67 million a year ($86 […]