Charles Alexander
40,515 Lifetime Quarts
Parting Glances I can be contentedly thinking of a dozen inconsequential things – Major League baseball scores, movie star divorce trivia, Rebiblican obtuseness – but let me get a city block from my art studio, and suddenly I have to, oh, darn it, [...]
Parting Glances: One minute past 12
If you're going to stay home alone on New Year's Eve it's best to have a plan (or pretend to). That way if someone asks you (smugly), "What did you do New Year's Eve?" you can say (smartly), "Well, unlike the previous 20 years, this year's [...]
Mad About 'The Boy'
Parting Glances There are bits and pieces, odds and ends, this, thats, the others, that adhere like crazy glue to my brain pan. Some of these mental bits of flotsam and jetsam are almost as old as I am . . .. . . the pre-'In God We Trust' Pledge [...]
Mark your calendars: Urgent!
Parting Glances The following items – for reasons happily positive, homophobic negative – recently made their uncharted way to my educational, ecumenical, and sometimes egregious email address. I feel it my journalistic duty as a senior citizen of [...]
Wedding Belles Are Wringing
Parting Glances It all started as an oh-so-clever, Mary! same-sex wedding joke that quickly got out of hand, soon becoming an urban legend. This year there's a happy ending for one of the "grooms" caught as the saying goes between a rock and a [...]
A Voice On Pause ...
Parting Glances It happened suddenly. One minute I had my voice. The next minute it was gone. There was no temperature. No nausea. No dizziness. (No more dementia than usual.) Somehow my voice just came and, poof! went. Friends said I sounded like [...]
Fruit-flavored Banking
Parting Glances The following quote is just too, well, fabulous – to use an overworked gay adjective – not to bring it out of the celluloid closet to coincide the HBO's planned May airing of "Behind the Candelabra," its sequined salute to the most [...]
Fleet Too Out, Get Outed
Parting Glances Back in the "good old days" of Great Depression #1, following Stock Market Crash '29 – years and years – well, at least a galloping few – before my time, the seven arts took a real financial broadsiding. Money for spending on [...]
Parting Glances
In 1987 some 165, 000 people pledged $1,000 to Muskegon-born Jim Bakker's Heritage U.S.A., a Bible-themed vacation and recreation village. For their ready cash each was promised a four-day stay and a down home Gospel good time. They got nothing and [...]
A Paine In The T-party
Parting Glances If one person can be truly said to have single-handedly pushed this country into a War of Independence from England it was patriot and pamphleteer Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809). His book "Common Sense" provided a clarion call to open [...]
Polly, Pegs, Salads Tossed
Parting Glances A New York madam by the name of Polly Adler wrote a tell-all best seller about her 30 years in the brothel business. "A House is Not a Home" created a media sensation in 1953. In 1949 I was 13 when I got an inkling that something [...]
Rub Peter. Lay Paul.
Parting Glances For whatever reason of erotic senescence or jaded performance acumen – emphasis on syllable three – I've been giving online erotica a clinical look. (Yeah, sure, Mary.) Porn's our 21st century version of the carnival sideshow; or, [...]