It’s Christmas Eve in 2005 and I am packed and ready to go to Puerto Vallarta. My suitcase waits by the front door. My flight leaves at 9AM on Christmas Day and I cannot wait to get out of Chicago. It’s been an awful year. I broke up with my boyfriend of seven years and I’ve been in a fog ever since. I lost my mojo, my school spirit, my ability to sleep through the night. I almost lost my job […]
My father died twice. The first time had nothing to do with me. That was completely on him. I’ll never know how coherent he was when he slammed his truck into the side of a bridge; his high blood alcohol count at the time will forever veil that evening in a haze. I imagine there were at least a few spare seconds of “Oh, fuck.” It feels better to think that we will have a moment to prepare ourselves for […]
Listen to Neil’s story below. It was originally performed at The Arrow, a production of The Neo-Futurists. I am in tears — the ugliest crier you’ve ever seen — reading an essay by Stephanie Wittels about suffering and her daughter’s hearing loss and her brother Harris’ death and a split-second later I am doubled over in laughter because someone has put the lips from that exasperated guy meme on a picture of MLK in response to Donald Fuckface’s tweets about […]
I married a male version of my mother. If you believe Murray Bowen, the father of family therapy, we choose partners to help us work through unresolved conflict with our parents. Weird. But, then again, maybe he was onto something. Here’s a snapshot of my husband, Allan: “You wanna drive to Baltimore today?” he asks me. We’re waking up on a Saturday morning with no plans. “Baltimore? Why?” “For a ballgame. The Orioles have a great park.” “Isn’t that kind […]
Listen to Vivian’s story below. It was originally performed at Story Club Columbus in front of a live audience. It seemed a fitting end to 2016. On Christmas morning, around 4 AM, my 17-year-old daughter Rose was woken by our little dog Ziggy vomiting profusely around the house. She went back to sleep, but at 6 AM she woke me up to tell me that something was wrong with Ziggy– she suspected he’d eaten a chocolate bar that she’d brought […]
Julie’s story was told as part of Miss Spoken’s October 2015 show. The theme was Sex Ed, and she’s at the 35:03 mark. My sexual education started with my first kiss at 14. My neighbor Justin was 16, drove a Mustang with the vanity plate “JUSTANG” on the back, and kissed me while I was sitting in his lap on a sidewalk. So, like, from behind. I had braces, and he had one muscular arm and one flabby arm because of […]
A bayonet knocked on the door. A Filipino servant answered. The Japanese soldier asked to speak with Mr. Harry N. Salet. Mr. Salet was expecting them. It was January 5, 1942. Mr. Salet was my grandfather. During the previous nights he had buried his WWI ceremonial saber and any remnants of his service in the US Marines under the house. The Philippines were under constant bombardment just 10 hours after the disastrous destruction of Pearl Harbor. My family’s house shook […]
Meeting the matriarch of my husband’s family came as a bit of a shock to me. When we visited them over Christmas, a woman dressed in head-to-toe in lilac hugged me and presented me with a gift: a jewelry box made from balsa wood that she’d glued shells onto and hand-painted turquoise. I held it in my hands as she smiled at me; this was Grandma Evelyn, Aaron’s mother’s mother. She was so foreign to me, so seemingly not real […]
I was 12 years old, playing tag with my two sisters at home in the backyard. When I talk about my sisters I am referring to my biological sister who was one year older than me, and my cousin who had been living with us for about five years, who we considered not our cousin, but our sister. Suddenly, our game of tag was interrupted by loud voices coming from inside the house. Then the noises turned to screams – […]
