“… I’m a theater guy. In my field, in my business, when a character addresses the audience, there are two options: he or she is on the stage itself, in front of us, telling a story (see Our Town, Swimming to Cambodia), or the character is speaking to us from a specific place and time other than onstage and right now. The actual actor is always in the present, on the stage, but the character, more often than not, is somewhere else—some other location at some other moment—addressing us from there. Someone once excitedly told me about seeing a play by Irish playwright Conor McPherson, one in which a guy tells his long, crazy story directly to the audience and then, at the end, puts on a necktie. Suddenly, the audience knows he’s going out, or going to court, or wherever. The reveal is that he is not…

“The Beatles made several appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, including three in February 1964 that were among their first appearances in front of an American audience. Their first appearance, on February 9, was seen by a then-record 73 million viewers and came to be regarded as a cultural watershed that launched American Beatlemania—as well as the wider British Invasion of American pop music—and inspired many young viewers to become rock musicians. The band also made another appearance during their 1965 U.S. tour. Ed Sullivan Show talent booker Jack Babb saw the Beatles twice in concert in the UK in 1963, after being invited by Peter Prichard, a London talent agent who was also friend of Beatles manager Brian Epstein. Babb was initially uninterested in booking the group for the show, as British musical acts at that time experienced little commercial success in the U.S…

“ZigZag was a British rock music magazine. It was started by Pete Frame and the first edition was published on 16 April 1969. The magazine was noted for its interviews, articles, innovative ‘rock family trees’ by Frame, and support for American songwriters such as Michael Nesmith, Mickey Newbury, Gene Clark, etc. It lasted in various forms through 1986. It was edited by Pete Frame for the first 29 issues, up to February 1973. Frame later said: ‘None of the English music papers wrote about the music I liked. They all concentrated on popular acts, but I was interested in the Underground scene. So I decided to start a magazine for people who liked the same kind of music I did. I called it Zigzag after the Captain Beefheart track Zigzag Wanderer and also the cigarette papers, which were used for rolling joints.’ Pete Frame’s…

Baptized at the Creek
by Shutta Crum

All us kids stood—wide-eyed. Cousin Billy
stuck his thumb in his mouth, as they laid Aunt Gertie backward
under the brown waters of the creek.

Right then and there, sacredness came floating ‘round us.
The holler got so warm and holy I could hardly breathe.
I reached out and squeezed Sissy’s hand.

Aunts and uncles, standing witness, shouted Hallelujah!
and raised their arms to heaven. Billy peed on a tree.
We giggled. Uncle Winn snagged him with his arm.
Grandpa prayed.
Praise the Lord!

When they helped Aunt Gertie up the bank of the creek
her clothes clung sopping over her rounder parts,
the way honey clings to a biscuit. I tried not to look.

We ate corn bread, fried chicken, green beans and ham hocks,
homemade rolls, canned peaches, and Grandma’s pies.
Billy wiggled, corralled between Uncle Winn and Grandpa.

Cousin Louann…

February 5^th was established in 2004 as California Western Monarch Day by the California state legislature, to celebrate these beautiful butterflies and their annual migration to spend winters on the central coast of California, and to highlight the rapid rate of their decline. Researchers estimate that a jaw-dropping 970 million monarchs have vanished just since 1990.

To read more about Monarchs, other butterflies, and moths click:

There are various ways we learn about a fictional character, and one shorthand route is when she or he has a memorable nickname.

Such is the case with the co-star of Kristin Hannah’s riveting, heartbreaking 2015 novel The Nightingale, which I finished yesterday. Isabelle is a young French woman who, during World War II, is nicknamed “The Nightingale” when she bravely risks her life time and time again sneaking downed British and American pilots out of Nazi-occupied France. Isabelle’s nickname evokes the night (the best traveling time to avoid detection during her fraught trips) as well as the melodious nightingale bird and the founder of modern nursing Florence Nightingale. The prickly, rebellious Isabelle — just 18 when she joins the French Resistance — is a helper. 

Obviously, a nickname can have negative connotations, too. In another WWII novel, Kate Quinn’s 2019 thriller The Huntress, the title is the…

Good Morning!

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WelcometoTheCoffeeShop, just for you early risers
on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum,
so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in
your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.

_____________________________

A dead end street is a good
place to turn around.
– Naomi Judd

How far you go in life depends on
your being tender with the young,
compassionate with the aged,
sympathetic with the striving and
tolerant of the weak and strong.
Because someday in your life
you will have been all of these.
– George Washington Carver

Jeffrey Fleishman of the Los Angeles Times describes the assault on librarians by rightwing groups and parents who want to ban books. Across the country, but especially in red states, librarians are vilified as “the arm of Satan” by those who want to control what books are on the library shelves. If you want to read a concise summary of book-banning, read my book The Language Police, published by Knopf.

He writes:

In her time as a Texas school librarian, Carolyn Foote watched the image of her profession veer from “shrinking violets behind spectacles” cataloging titles to “pedophiles and groomers” out to pollute the minds of the nation’s youth.

“Librarians came from a climate of being so appreciated to hearing this message that we’re reviled,” said Foote, co-founder of Freadom Fighters, an advocacy group for librarians that has nearly 15,000 Twitter followers. “It was an astonishing turn of events.”…

The College Board has not released the syllabus for the AP African-American Studies course that the state of Florida wants to ban because, they say, it has “no educational value” and violates state law by invoking “critical race theory.

But the syllabus was released by NBC News and is easily found on the internet.

And here is the syllabus.

I suggest that you read it for yourself.

Stanley Kurtz, a conservative academic, wrote a scathing critique in National Review, where he blasted the AP course as “Neo-Marxist” and intent on propagating a socialist-Marxist-Communist mindset. Google and you will find follow-up articles by Kurtz.

I taught the history of American education, and I wrote books that specifically included the history of the education of Black Americans. To write about the history, I read many of the authors cited in the AP course. None of those authors, like Frederick Douglass or Carter…

Picking Cherries
by Mary Rohrer-Dann

My father lifts me to pick sour
cherries from my grandmother’s tree.
His whiskers scrape against my skin.
Sugar cubes stuffed in our cheeks,
we eat straight from the dinged pail,
spit out yellow pits, bits of twig and leaf.

In this dream he is my young father,
dark-haired, muscled, laughter easy
on his lips. Afternoon slips into blue
twilight with nothing more to do
than pick and eat cherries,
watch shadows purpling green grass.

First published by Vita Brevis Press in July 2020, and included in the author’s collection, Taking the Long Way Home (Kelsay Books, 2021).

Photo by Hans.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My father is long gone, but he has visited me in dreams on occasion, for which I am grateful.

PHOTO: The author and her father on the beach in Atlantic City, circa 1954.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mary Rohrer-Dann, author of