Last Call for the Merit Badge Failures
It always returns at the end of summer–the feeling of failure. It has a dry, bitter taste that goes with it, as if it’s a wasting disease that afflicts your entire body and psyche and […]
Author: Con Chapman
I'm a Boston-area writer, author of The Year of the Gerbil, a history of the 1978 Red Sox-Yankees pennant race, and 50 books of humor including "Scooter & Skipper Blow Things Up!" by HumorOutcasts Press. My work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor and The Boston Globe among print outlets. "Rabbit's Blues," my biography of Johnny Hodges, Duke Ellington's long-time alto sax player, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019, and was named Book of the Year by Hot Club de France. My young adult novel, "Kimiko Chou, Girl Samurai," was published by Atmosphere Press in 2021.
As Colleges Re-Open, Efforts to Clone Male Folk Dancers Grow
KEOKUK, Iowa. Woodminster College is a co-educational liberal arts college that is out of the mainstream of American undergraduate life in this town of approximately 11,000, but it shares one big problem with its fellow […]
No Country for Dangling Modifiers
The mozo was an old man with a bad leg named Luis who had fought at Torreon and San Pedro and later at Zacatecas. The charro stood leaning against the front fender of the truck […]
For Young Cowboy Poets, Hot Practices Only Get Verse
AMARILLO, Texas. Joe Don Mergen has just a week left before he begins the school year as a sophomore at Darrell Royal High School here, but he says he’s looking forward to it even though […]
Writing My Obituary
It came on all of a sudden, like a summer thunderstorm. We had been talking at dinner about friends and family, and family of friends, who had passed on recently, and my wife became teary-eyed. “You […]
At the French Toilet Races
Hubert and his wife had taken a villa at Deauville, and in the morning papers Undine followed the chronicle of Hubert’s polo scores and of the Countess Hubert’s racing toilets. Edith Wharton, The Custom of […]
To the Woman Checking Her Pits in the Friday Sales Meeting
It’s hot, I know, and there are places you’d rather be; the beach for one, same with me, and with you I would go. But we are stuck here, my dear; me in the front […]
At the Procter & Gamble Bad Hair Day Laboratory
Procter & Gamble has mobilized a team of researchers to determine by scientific methods when a woman will have a bad hair day. The Wall Street Journal Don’t laugh–it could happen to you. We […]
“Inward Bound” Teaches Rural Kids Suburban Ropes
GREEN RIDGE, Missouri. Brooke Bennett grew up in this tiny but busy farming hamlet nestled among fields of sorghum, lespedeza and timothy, which boasts not one but two full-time village idiots. “It was great to be a […]
Ask the Department of Motor Vehicles Action Reporter!
Got a beef about a surly clerk at the license renewal counter? Wondering if you can re-take your license photo now that you’ve got contacts? Ask the Department of Motor Vehicles Action Reporter, he’ll cut […]