The Place to Take a Humor Break
BROOKLINE, Mass. This overwhelmingly liberal community is situated just west of Boston’s Kenmore Square, a proximity that sometimes makes for uncomfortable encounters between drunken sports fans and nightclub habitues to the east and more pacific […]
IRONDALE, Alabama. An edgy, innovative game show–”Stump the Nuns!”–has turned into a ratings sensation for the Eternal Word Television Network, the nation’s leading provider of televised Catholic content. “What is the Communion of Saints?” […]
CONCORD, New Hamsphire. Ted and Gina Holcomb have been married for twenty-two years, and while the two have a good relationship now, they admit their early years were sometimes difficult. “Gina’s more sentimental than me,” her husband […]
CHAMPAIGN, Illinois. Deborah Ralsted is smiling bravely as she is wheeled down the halls of Our Lady of Bed Sores Hospital, but at the corners of her mouth and her eyes one can detect traces […]
KEOKUK, Iowa. Elwood “Bud” Zaremba, pioneering knuckle-ball pitcher, died in his sleep in a nursing home here Sunday night after a brief illness. Zaremba played with five major league teams over a 17-year career during […]
The tradition of American memoir is a rich and varied one, from Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice to J. Edgar Hoover’s Memoirs of a Cross-Dressing G-Man. That vein of silver has been tarnished by […]
May is supposed to be a merry month, going back as far as Elizabethan dramatist Thomas Dekker, who wrote the deathless lines: O, the month of May, the merry month of May, So frolic, so […]
A chilly, sunny April Saturday. There’s just me and two cats, Rocco and Okie, three sullen males grunting their way through the day–as usual–while the wife’s running errands. Rocco: “You insensitive clod!” And yet something’s–not quite right. […]
For those who want to make a living as writers, the situation grows more dire every day. There are increasingly fewer publications that review books, and space in the ones that remain is reserved mainly […]
It was, I thought, an innocent act. My publisher called to say that the manuscript to my first book, The Year of the Gerbil, was finished, and that he had obtained a blurb, a quote […]