Category Archives: semi-fiction

Joni Mitchell In Drag

November 27, 2023 – 2:32 pm

I was born in 1952. During that prehistoric period doctors had no way of predicting an infant’s sex, yet my mother was so convinced that her second child would be a girl that a year’s worth of pretty pink baby clothing lay neatly stacked in a crib prior to my birth. I imagine she experienced […]

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Big Bird Day

November 23, 2023 – 4:36 am

Two years ago I walked through Grand Central Terminal. Thousands of passengers were striving to catch a train home for Thanksgiving. My sister had invited her family feast outside of Boston. I have to work on Friday and opted out on the holiday exodus to spend a quiet day at the Fort Greene Observatory. I […]

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An Artist’s Fast Fingers

November 21, 2023 – 11:26 pm

My boss Manny started selling jewelry on Canal Street in 1954. He says that he didn’t sell his first diamond until a year later. “Back then all diamonds were white. We didn’t know any better and better still neither did the Gs.” Manny’s speech is colored by hundreds of diamond selling terms interspersed with Yiddish. […]

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Missile Away

November 21, 2023 – 8:29 pm

Having returned to my split-level house from Our Lady of the Foothills, I tore off my Catholic school uniform and dressed in a tee-shirt and jeans. My mother was in the laundry room. My brothers and sisters were watching WHERE THE ACTION IS on the TV. It was too nice a day for the lip-synching […]

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A WALK IN FOG by Peter Nolan Smith

November 12, 2023 – 4:02 am

On a murky November evening I attended the opening of the “Dream’ exhibition at Luxembourg’s Mudam Museum. Madame l’Ambassador bailed early for a formal affair. I was not invited for the dinner. “It’s a diplomatic thingee.” Madame l’Ambassador explained, as we walked through a thickening fog to the waiting Jaguar. “I understand.” A writer-in-residence has […]

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