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…
Writer John McNally’s work has appeared in more than 100 periodicals and anthologies. He is the author of two story collections, three novels (one of which became a YA book), a memoir, and three books for creative writers, including most recently The Promise of…
A professor I knew was very interested in the ways class got represented in fiction. He pointed out that due to the vagaries of fashion there would always be new markers of it available to writers. One of his favorites then was “bad teeth,” by which he meant crooked or…
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Hot Wheels, the little cars that are the number-one selling toy in the world. Manufacturer Mattel has a 16-city tour in progress that includes a design contest, life-size fleet, die-cast historical display, and Forza X-Box gaming. My mother, who was…
If you use social media, you know the difficulties. How to feel about those who love something you love but who, you believe in the sub-basement of your heart, have missed the point? A childhood friend, educated, prosperous, posts a tribute to Aretha Franklin on his wall. “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” he writes.
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! A municipal garden is a beautiful contradiction, an embodiment of the struggle between nature and human control. Visitors to The Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis on a recent afternoon stepped from the welcome center into the Garden grounds, where the…
If there is a Frankenstein that best serves our time, it would be “The Frankenstein Chronicles,” a BBC series that barely made it to the US market via Netflix three years after its original airing in the UK. It is not loyal to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” by a stretch.