By MERRILL MARKOE Here’s Something New to Feel Good About Today! Once upon a time, in a town called North Hollywood, there was a 95-pound black dog named Lewis who lived with a woman who only fed him twice a day. Ever since an evil veterinarian cast a spell to make her think he needed to lose a few pounds, the poor dog...
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In 1960 the country was concerned about the Cold War with Russia, but I worried about the hot and cold wars in our household. Pearl was my mother’s housekeeper, and if I sensed a warm ocean breeze floating through the house, I knew Pearl was there. She eased the tension of a household stressed by financial and emotional turmoil, smoothing what vestiges of discord remained from the previous night.
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My dad carried me up the narrow winding staircase to my bedroom. I had left home weighing all of ninety pounds, but with this plaster of paris body cast, I was a real load.
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Michelle held an old shoe box on her lap. She clasped it tightly with both hands as if I might, at any moment, leap up and grab it from her. She sat on the edge of a chair next to my bed and eyed me to make sure that I heard her, believed her and obeyed her.
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The Long Beach Police Department assigned my husband to rotating shifts the year our son, Steve, started first grade. So Bob slept mornings and worked evenings. On weekends often he’d pull a day shift. Our schedules rarely jibed.
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As a Hollywood writer with twenty-one scripts to my credit, I am no stranger to stories from the heart. How did I know, that I, myself, would become the center of one so dramatic?
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© Sharon O. Blumberg As a child, I admired my neighbor’s birdbath, adorned with two brightly-colored, porcelain birds. Outside playing with friends, I would eye the red porcelain one resting upon its white platform. I adored watching Mrs. Vitriola tend to her birdbath; she had the sweetest disposition. But my curiosity overcame...
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I was already a movie buff by the time I was five. On Saturdays my family would drive the fifty miles over rocky, barely passable Wyoming roads from Grass Creek to Thermopolis to see whichever motion picture Hollywood had sent to the single theatre
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We all have aspects of our appearance that we’re comfortable with and other things we are self-conscious about. For me, teeth fit into the first category, hair the second. I was born with thin, fine, stick straight brown hair. No amount of curling, coating, fluffing or fixing has ever achieved a look that allows me to walk...
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© 2009 Christine Graf Somewhere between sleep and the cloudy space where dreams take root and go deeper, I roused from the anvil weight of drugs. I heard whispering, as bed sheets fluttered and snapped into military folds. Still thinking I was in a dream state, I saw what appeared to be a Nubian queen, wearing a bright orange...
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