by Rosamund
My father was a good man, so he wanted the best for his daughter. When my parents banned Barbie, it was Dad who was behind it. The rules of Barbie were complicated. When my aunt and uncle gave me a Barbie doll for my birthday, my parents solemnly placed her in a box, put that box on the highest shelf in my closet, and told me I could have her when I was 16 years old. On the other hand, […]
Categories: Joy Ellison, Story Club South Side
by Rosamund
“Aren’t you nervous about meeting Chuck’s mother?” everyone kept asking me. “Not at all,” I’d reply. Chuck and I had been seeing each other almost a year, and although I haven’t met a special someone’s mother in almost two decades, I’ve got my mom- pleasing moves down. It’s basic stuff, really, moms just want you to be on time and look presentable. They want you to listen more than you talk; they want you to nod knowingly and agree with […]
Categories: Eileen Dougharty, Story Club South Side
by Rosamund
They say that everyone has a twin somewhere in the world. And you always see bad made-for-TV movies about these unsuspecting doppelgangers, where one is some movie star, CEO, or just plain rich person and the other is a real loser and ends up impersonating the other twin and totally screwing up the poor schmuck’s life. I actually thought I was safe. That no one in the universe could possibly look like me. Wrong. I met the bitch at a […]
Categories: Story Club South Side, Tekki Lomnicki
When the tactical squad raided my basement apartment on 32nd and May in February of 1985, they discovered a baseball-sized rock of cocaine.
Categories: Bill Drew, Story Club South Side
Lily Be is the producer of Stoop Style Stories and a spoken word artist. She lives in Chicago.
Categories: Lily Be, Story Club South Side
I have known the most amazing dog that has ever lived. I understand that you might be offended by this controversial statement, because you believe you have known the most amazing dog that has ever lived, but this is not a conversation. I’m just stating a fact. The truth. Frankie The Dog (her formal name) was a ten-year-old- neurotic and strange black Labrador retriever and on one winter’s day I arrived home from work to find no Frankie – at least […]
Categories: Dani Bryant, Story Club South Side
I teach Improvisation at Columbia College in the Theatre Department. While it is a required course for many theatre students, it is one of the easiest classes ever. It is creative gym. You don’t even have to improvise well. If you show up, participate, and do the two writing assignments – short essays that include the favorite hyphenate of every college student, double-spaced – you will pass. The only way to fail is to not show up. The university policy […]
Categories: Joe Janes, Story Club South Side
In college, I was a raging, unapologetic gay-basher. Still recovering from Christianity, I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984 and would sit in the cafeteria at the University of Arkansas, holding court on how disgusting gays were, and how they should all be shipped out to a “Gay Island” and left to sodomize each other. I had my entourage of college boys, laughing at my angry rants, my hate-filled comedy of intolerance. I was like a young Rush Limbaugh, gathering […]
Categories: Don Hall, Story Club South Side
About four years ago, I had a breakthrough in quitting mentality. I had started dating for the first time. Well, I had been “dating” a man since college, though I don’t know if you consider eating in the university cafeteria and playing computer games together dating. I did, and we moved in together after college. He was a physicist who played “Legend of Zelda” on three monitors at once. He thought the city was almost as inconvenient as socializing. I […]
Categories: Jill Howe, Story Club South Side
