Charles Alexander
Parting Glances: Color Coding For Jesus!
A group called Noah's Angels is spending big bucks to provide dolphins with bodysuits to stop gay activity among this frisky, highly sexually active species. (Dolphins are one of 450 animal groping, er, groupings known to enjoy same-sex [...]
Parting Glances: 13 Years Next Week
Among five digit numbers in high demand for Spain's $1.2 – Madre de Dios! – billion dollar Christmas lottery was 11901, the standard European dating for the World Trade Center devastation. The year of Spain's yuletide game was 2001. It was certainly [...]
Parting Glances: No Onan! Oh, No!
Years ago there was a physique magazine, Tomorrow's Man, that for 50 cents newsstand purchase could be discreetly hidden in a hip pocket for private enjoyment. (Considered pornographic it was a federal offense to send copies through the mail.) There [...]
Parting Glances: White House S/henanigans
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1965 historic march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., for Negro voter rights changed the South forever. (Or, did it?) Few know that another King – William Rufus DeVane King – gave Selma its name 145 years earlier. (It means [...]
Parting Glances: Band Tunes Remembered
Mort Crowley's "Boys In the Band" opened Off-Broadway almost 50 years ago. I bought a copy of the play in Chicago in 1968 and read dialog aloud while driving back to Detroit with my then partner Larry Stetson. We saw a local production a year later [...]
Parting Glances Septuagenarianly Speaking
I just turned 70 something or other a couple of months ago, though I actually look much younger with the help of a portable scrim, a Sunset Boulevard screen, and a 60-watt bulb, with five year guarantee. Transporting same is problematic when making [...]
Parting Glances: JHVH's Door Bell Trade
It's hard to say if it's a good thing or an alarming thing, a plus or a minus for the city of Detroit, but there are 90,000 Jehovah's Witnesses in town for a second convention go around in two months. When the JWs – everybody's unrelenting religious [...]
Parting Glances: Bavel's Rolero Redux
At my age, I fidget after five minutes exposure to certain quote/unquote cultural happenings. Harpsichord recitals. Accordion extravaganzas. Art song evenings. "Gilligan's Island" reruns. Lower body piercing demos. Televised Irish flaming feet of [...]
Parting Glances: Twinkling of the inner eye ...
I'm sitting on my front porch during the twilight 9 o'clock hour. These early July evenings are both warm and occasionally, as now, delightfully cool. The temperature is 70-something or other. Caressingly mild. Motor City quiet and contentment. For [...]
Parting Glances: Dropping In For Won Ton
I'm sitting in a popular Somerset Mall Chinese restaurant where I'm distracted by two improbabilities: an astounding free fall record I'm reading about and a waitress named Susie who persists in calling me Honey. Honey, this. Honey, that. Over [...]
Parting Glances: Ex-Gay Fairy Tale
This is the story of Dorian Lavender who has vanished from the party scene of music, stimulants, sex and is now ironically beyond the saving grace of suddenly discarded friends of which there were many. (Perhaps you knew him too.) While no tracing [...]
Parting Glances S-S Kissing AD 1300
Speaking of contemporary bad times, global warming, world conflicts, trouble and turmoil, epidemics, on-going territorial elbowing – sound all too familiar? – there's large-scale European precedent dating back 700 years. Curiously, the climactic [...]