“Hey, look! Something tiny and green is growing in the tar!” Popping my head through the open trap door to the roof. Pausing just for a moment before hoisting myself up. You, sprawled on your stomach in cutoffs and an old University of Wisconsin t-shirt of mine that you slept in a lot, peering over […]
Renee Fleming and Yo Yo Ma drop by a neighborhood high school in Chicago. Originally published in 2012 on “Open Salon.”
A tribute to Paris
Staring hard into the deepest night of the Wisconsin forest, wondering if I had become like Barry just after he and Pam had bought the tiny cluster of simple, screened in cabins on the deserted beach in Tortola where, word had it, Madonna used to stay. Cocktails at sunset for the nine couples who were […]
“Listen hard,” I asked all ten of them sitting around the table. “What’s the first thing you hear?” “Guy playing the piano.” several of them said at once. “What else? Listen again.” This time the woman heard it. “There’s somebody on bass.” She said. First time there had been a woman in the Wednesday night […]
Ronnie Gilbert Tribute
A Life of Caring Sometimes in the comforting grey late summer light that holds the Chicago Loop in a subdued humid hum of pure power; I can feel the presence of my grandfather, Frank J. Dowd. Gone since I was just a kid. A red faced, weary knowing smile, wisps of white hair, round and […]
Five years ago today. The BP oil spill. And if you had even the most remote connection to the rhythm and rock water soul of the earth, you wept. Because it was as if we, all of us, had taken our promise to take care of the earth during our time, sprinkled that promise with […]
Algren and deBeauvoir and an MRI Machine while Phil Ochs explains it all.
Good Friday everywhere. And a very young June Carter and Johnny Cash.