“Do you remember when I directed Arturo Ui with the kids?” Cecil asks me.
I didn’t. Not offhand. Cecil had been a secondary school English and drama teacher, exiting the profession, he claimed, before they replaced all books with instruction manuals. That was back a few years now. Retirement suited Cecil who’d definitely mellowed, became less ornery and cantankerous. Continue reading
[Is she or isn’t she? Vaccinated, that is. The second installment of what we may or may not be calling ‘Devine’s Intervention’. Already out of the loop? You can get all caught with Part One here.]
***
“How would I know?” dad responds, very defensively. “I would assume so,” he adds, regaining some of his usual measured manner.
“You’d assume so?!”
“Well, it’s not something you simply come out and ask someone you’re just getting to know now, is it.” Continue reading
[The plan here is for some serialized fiction. Begin at the beginning with no end in sight, hoping to recognize it before simply running out of ink, metaphorically speaking. That’s how Charles Dickens went about it, right? Our output will be irregular and we won’t be paid by the word although that might not always be obvious. Assisting with the project, we’ve brought out from retirement legendary editor and small house publisher of arcane texts, B. Louis Penn, who greeted our request for gratis help with a pithy, ‘Ive got nothing better to do aside from waiting to die’. With that bar set appropriately low, enjoy!]
***
It pretty much came off the rails—
“Just like I said it would,” Avrum crowed hours after the fact.
–during dad’s birthday dinner at the Keg.
“He was going to be low-grade mocking,” Avrum continued, laying out the obvious, “we knew that.” We did, yes. “I mean, has he ever been to a Keg in his life?” A rhetorical question from my brother. Dad was not a steakhouse kind of guy. Continue reading