Shoot Me, I’m Dating Online (8)
Dates have come and gone bye-bye. Let me see. One friend didn’t appreciate my letting him pay for our first several dates, whereas I thought I was allowing him to exercise his male prerogative; then there was the guy who phoned to give me his ground rules regarding what I had to do if we had […]
Shoot Me, I’m Online Dating (4)
Skate boarding through the chatrooms of lonely algorithms, I meet a contractor who wants to know my idea of a life-partner I text him caring, intelligent, sexy, etc. and he says wow that’s just what he’s looking for and do I think he fits that description? I text him how the fuck should I know […]
Orientation in Ruston with Shakespeare
I saw gangs of young people coming at me from every direction wearing blue shirts that said “Wear, Live, Think, Dream.” Luckily, they were friendly. One of the groups helped me to find the bathroom, which I sorely needed following my drive from Sterlington. I was there to attend a student play that was being […]
My Own Personal Hotspot (Upcoming Readings)
For the past thirty years I have drawn the same face on napkins and in the margins of notebooks. Why am I predisposed to the same doodle that reasserts itself on every available surface? I am fond of my doodle, which over the years has become a part of my signature. Recognizable. Part of me. […]
Afikomen in Sterlington, Louisiana
Daffodils sprouting in bright yellow bunches always have always signaled for me spring and Passover. Matzah plays a big role here, the unleavened bread symbolic of the Jewish exodus from enslavement in Egypt about 3,300 years ago. (“Hurry up, Sadie. We don’t have time for the bread to rise. Grab your hat and let’s go!”) […]
Note to Google: Honey, Not Tonight. I Have a Headache…
Don’t get me wrong. If I need to find something on the Internet, I know how to type a few keywords inside a search box. But remember those almost bygone linear search days when all we had to do was to scan a list of blue links and choose one or two or maybe three? […]
A Star Trek of the Stomach
(More from the Leftover Chef) My idea was to “create a brand” for myself, which is what my job club had advised. I could teach others how to get by buying next to nothing. An elevator speech unfolded before my eyes. TV’s Food Network made altogether too many demands on the budget requiring the cook […]
Birth of the Leftover Chef
One afternoon before the close of the fiscal year I received a phone call. As a member of the union’s executive team, I guessed the phone call had something to do with layoffs, an item that had been on the agenda for the last several meetings. I was right about the layoff part. We were […]
American Dream Sequence
It was a humzinger of a dream, baby, I dreamed it for you, baby. Gypsy Rose Lee put away your feathers. Things get muddled with interlocking conglomerates high profit on the margin kind of dreams my mother wanted me to be a teacher not a stripper take the summer off with my husband and kids […]
Living Around the Bayou
Down the street, rather along Highway 165, I turned off at Cross Keys Bank to open an account and deposit a check from West End Press in payment for my trip to the Albuquerque Cultural Conference. (Maybe my life is changing.) Cross Keys is a local community bank with origins in St. Joseph, Louisiana and […]