A parlor game for those with more pallor than parlor: What would we do if we had no debts, no deadlines, nowhere we had to be? (No restrictions at all is so silly it shatters the fantasy; there are no games without rules.) The dollar amounts are not so large,…
You know that old joke about English majors: “They don’t know anything, but they know where to go to find things out.” I resemble that remark. And as a former English major and common reader, I see that learned skill as one of the glories of what we tremble to…
“This all kind of started because of a sarcastic comment that Peggy made on Facebook last fall,” Greg says of his wife, a privacy attorney with her own firm in Atlanta. “Someone had just gotten a Jawa costume approved by the Georgia Garrison of the 501st, and…
Communities provide and take away, two forms of power that reinforce and balance each other until they do not. Bigger communities, such as cities, states, or nations, provide opportunities to earn a living; infrastructure such as roads to get to work and the store; and mutual aid—firefighters save our homes…
Groucho Marx visited the wreckage of the Führerbunker, in East Berlin, in 1958 with his young daughter. The remains of the structure were broken and jagged but still 20-feet tall, as if the war was just over. Groucho climbed up and began to do “a frenetic Charleston,…
Fifteen years ago a drunk and high driver smashed into the car that Charles and his wife were traveling in. Charles was badly hurt, had reconstructive surgeries, and continues to have crippling headaches several days a week. Because he has been prescribed many drugs, which often fail over time, he…
Hannah Gadsby’s 2018 standup special, Nanette, contains a brilliant trick that has nothing to do with the special’s title, which is merely the name of a love interest who did not work out.The trick is that Gadsby begins with a traditional standup routine then uses the occasion…
Standups who do something other than crack jokes are not new or unusual. Carlin’s act consisted of tearing down cultural conceits with jazzy profanity. Rickles was still slinging insults at 87 when he sat down with Jerry Seinfeld in Comedians in Cars and talked…
Comedian Dave Chappelle released four standup specials in 2017 that are considered his return to show business, after quitting Chappelle’s Show in 2006. The way he suddenly left the successful show (and a $50 million contract with Comedy Central) led to rumors he had a drug problem or mental health…
Larry and I met years ago in the cubicle-pen of a Fortune-1000 company. Looking back, our separate paths through jobs and geographies now seem to have meandering coherency.
Something odd and beautiful happened to Jess Stacy that night in 1938. It is easy to have the impression he never experienced anything quite like it again. Stacy had played piano for the Benny Goodman orchestra since 1935 and was on stage the night they (with other musicians) played the…
Local media has been reporting the demise of St. Louis’s Chinatown, another victim of big-box development. But it is not so much a Chinatown—officially it is called the Olive Link—as a small polyglot area of Olive Boulevard near Highway 170, which the Post Dispatch calls “the gritty back door” of…