It was one of those nights we wait all year for, the first night where you can go outside without a coat or a sweater. I walked up Lincoln Avenue after an uncommonly good production of Hamlet, and thinking many thoughts about the play.
It’s 10:30 in the morning. We’re on the sixth hole of the golf course, and I’m on my fourth beer. It’s a thick 95 degrees. My cargo shorts are wet and sticking to my inner thighs. My father turns to me. “So, have you turned to Jesus?” “What?” “Have you found some kind of religion? That seems to be what all the women in your family are doing.” I’m an atheist. I’m a non-golf-playing atheist who doesn’t function well in […]
After two and a half years of dating Charlotte, it was becoming difficult to give a shit about the things she found important. We had been living together for about eighteen months. We kept different hours. I worked a nine-to-five job. She might roll out of bed at noon and do some freelance writing over a late breakfast. Then, she’d smoke some bud and watch the Oprah channel for the rest of the afternoon. I’d often find her loafing around […]
For Tom and John Gill, and Henry Hopkins. A bit over ten years ago, I bought my first record, the English Beat’s “I Just Can’t Stop It,” at Street Light Records, Pacific Avenue and Elm, Santa Cruz, because ska never dies in California. Fresh to Two-Tone sounds, without racial or political contexts, having no idea who they were talking about when they asked Margaret to stand down, please, stand down Margaret. I almost squealed with joy when the cashier said […]
Over the last year, the men I’ve dated with anything resembling seriousness have all been twice my age, which makes them older than my father. They are all smart, complicated, and notable in their field. Shortly after this year’s New Years, when I began seeing the most recent man, a woman I hardly knew told him to beware of my vagina. She called me a “climber,” and said I was trying to fuck my way up the artistic and social […]
My office consists of glass paneling, two computer screens, a tiny plastic Yoda figurine, and a thin blanket of self-defeat. I’ve been in this office for eight years, six years too many. My name is stenciled in the glass door: Kelsie Huff, Director of Marketing. I never thought of myself as a stencil.
At twenty-three I was a widow with a three-year-old son. When my son was about eight, I got a teaching job in Grayslake and we moved to Libertyville, two towns I had never heard of until then. Acting as both mother and father was no easy task and sometimes I made mistakes. Most of my mistakes were unimportant and are long gone from memory, but the incident I tell here is one that will stay with me as long as […]
“Oh, You Shouldn’t Have” comes to us from Johanna Stein’s new book How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane, on sale now on Amazon, B&N, andIndiebound. See more at jojostein.com It’s late December and I’ve just squeezed a nine-pound girl child through my hoo-ha. She’s being cleaned in the hospital nursery while her new, freaked-out father keeps watch. I am still in the delivery room, feeling exhausted, slightly throbbing, by mostly happy that it’s over and I no […]
The bathrooms at LaGuardia Airport remind me of the Taste of Chicago’s Port-a-Potties, but I have to drop a deuce before I head to Manhattan. Car service would be $50, a taxi $30, a shuttle $25, so I decide to walk to the M60 bus at the terminal stop because I’m in no hurry. I’ve traveled from Midway to LaGuardia via Spirit Airlines to see my daughter, Madison, who is three-years-old, and lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. The M60 […]
