Brokenheart is out of love, but wants in again. Brokenheart sends soul-revealing e-mails in which she wonders why her heart breaks all the time. I write back (shorter missives, less revealing), but Brokenheart and I never speak. What we do is trade calls. Each day, her recorded voice says, “Tag, you’re it.” When I call, … Read more
Nan’s friend, Moira, says her New Age guru asks, “What lessons are we learning?” whenever Moira gripes about a problem. Nan wants to slap her. The guru that is. She’s never met the woman, but the second-hand question makes her growl over the checkbook. “What can you learn from a sewer pipe?” She has gotten … Read more
When we officially announced our first-annual Indie 500 Fiction Contest (500 because short-story entries were restricted to that many words; “indie” for independent newspaper), we expected a decent trickle of entries — and received a deluge. Kind of like this year’s winter-weather scares, except the other way around. After spending months poring over a snowy … Read more
Most Americans who do lunch — even declared pacifists — end up immersed in the burrito wars, like it or not. Restaurant owners, on the other hand, have been embedded for years, covert strategists in the ongoing battle to offer a five-star wrap. I’m referring here not to the original Mexican burrito but rather the … Read more
Rocking Pritchard Park Last summer, a haphazard series of open-air rock shows held at Pritchard Park caught the attention of residents and tourists alike. Coordinated by members of local rock bands, the daylong shows were a haven for still-developing local talent that often found itself overlooked in the shadow of summer-event giants Bele Chere and … Read more
When no one in the audience laughs at a comedy, even its most lighthearted jokes can take a dark turn. And when those gags are dark to begin with, the whole affair can sink further still. At a recent staging of Pterodactyls, the relative silence of the tiny crowd turned the play into an ominous … Read more
“Once it’s had as much as it can take, it falls off,” pop star Britney Spears recently announced on the Web forum Contact Music. “It’s supposed to fall off every six months,” the bad press-beleaguered singer lamented. “Mine falls off every other day.” Perish whatever see-through-body-suit, Madonna-tongue-kiss thoughts you might be having: Spears is talking … Read more
