Nancy, a single woman, as they call the spinsters in our easy day. Trimming a lilac hedge for Nancy. Some kitchen woodwork next, if this goes well.
Something burnt-out about Nancy. A divorce, maybe. A weak spot for strong male egos, perhaps. A couple of those and gone is most of the best a woman comes with. And Nashville overflows with that genus.
She returned to her hometown two years back, having spent in Nashville her young woman’s prime. She was trying for a vocal break. It didn’t come. Still, she stayed on as a backup bird. She doesn’t talk about it, just drops a word or two. But that’s what I figure happened to Nancy in Nashville, Tennessee.Back home she found a job at Planned Parenthood. She doesn’t seem to count for much there, an errand girl. Not easy finding work in a small town.
Live from Planned Parenthood
The Third Rail
a chapter from Seattle
Heyward Studio My first piece in English was a novella about my childhood town. I wrote it in 1990, seven years after I had hit America. It got me invited to the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, for a writer residency.
Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town at MacDowell. I was now walking the streets of Grover’s Corners of the play. I first saw Our Town on a Commie TV as a teen and never again, but I was easily replaying now from the memory the chirping of the kids in the play, the concerned voices of the parents, the politeness of the neighbors, the eerie life-longings of the denouement. After watching it just once at the early stage in life, this wholesome-as-much-as-life-affords-wholesome world had gotten imprinted in me like a prayer. A variation of a call to go.
The American Trinity
a chapter from Americaa
God, the apostle Paul, and the comedian Lenny Bruce appeared to prominent American pornographer Larry Flynt, when in 1977 he was flying over the Rockies with Ruth Carter Stapleton, president Carter's sister, in his labia-pink jet. True story, he recalls it in his memoir: >>
Flynt was thrown into that spiritual spin because he was messing too much with the Sun (ultimate powers known and unknown). When biology clocked him at thirty-five, when a man needs to straighten out and get his job done, the Sun roared. Happens to many of us maturing guys, only in less otherworldly ways. With the pink-shot sophist Flynt it took an extreme turn. Not, primarily, because he was filthy in an extreme way―many guys are―but because he had become one of the notorious agents of ill eating away at the Western world.Flynt had had religious flashes for some time prior. Again, nothing unusual for a guy of that age and life history. But what made his case singular and exemplary for all to see, was being quite manifestly 'chosen' ("ultimate powers known and unknown") for a high-end mediumship to a whole race of people―Whites.
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