Charles Alexander
Parting Glances: Mirror, mirror on the wall
I awoke the day after my May 12th birthday – a festive date shared with actress Kate Hepburn, Union Civil War nurse Flo Nightingale, and baseball malaprop Yogi Berra – looked up at my ceiling mirror (with remote magnification tilt) and hopped back [...]
Parting Glances: Vesna, Susie: sweet & sour!
I'm sitting in a popular Somerset Mall Chinese restaurant where I'm distracted by two unrelated improbabilities: an astounding free fall record I'm reading about in a paperback I just bought, and a waitress named Susie who persists in calling me [...]
Tip o' the Obligation!
Parting Glances It's been decades since I sat on a tiny stool at Primary Sunday School; but I do recall hearing there — with a six-year-old's vivid, but untutored, imagination — the Old Testament story of how David collected the foreskins of 200 [...]
Parting Glances: Yo! My name is Spud
". . . and I'm a gay basher . . ." Beloved Friends: I'm sitting in on a meeting of Gay Basher's Anonymous with — unknown to the bashers — my pocket-size recording device surreptitiously "taking notes." I'm disguised as a Gay Basher: sporting a pair [...]
Parting Glances: My voices from beyond
"I love you from here to the moon and back . . ." Composer John Adams 9/11 commemorative piece, "On the Transmigration of Souls," with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and the UMS Choral Union Choir, proved a moving experience for me a sunny Sunday [...]
Parting Glances: How the cookie crumbles
I was fortunate to find a slim volume entitled "The Little Book of Etiquette: Tips on Socially Correct Dining," by Miss Sheila M. Long, who says it was "written for people with little spare time" and "fits neatly in briefcases or purses." "Tips" was [...]
Parting Glances: My everyday cellophane rage
 I'm quickly getting to the place in my life where I'll refuse to buy anything that requires spending more than two minutes trying to open it. Even a package of breath mints is a major challenge for me. By the time I got my $3.50 Ice Berg [...]
Parting Glances: Take me to your lederhosen
It's no secret that Pope Benedict XVI as teenager Joseph Alois Ratzinger was a Hitler Youth member. Born in 1927 (April 16th, if you care enough to send the very best at overseas airmail postal rate, $7.95), he joined in 1941, age 13. Perhaps it was [...]
Parting Glances: Mel Gibson, pinch thyself
Parting Glances I haven't read "The DaVinci Code." I haven't seen the popular movie. I don't plan to beg, borrow or steal either controversial blockbuster item. I'm content to accept the little-known "fact" that one of my ancestors way back when [...]
Parting Glances: Scatterpin goes clothes optional
No matter the time or the weather, there's something emotionally tingling about the cellphone vibrations whenever Sr. Serena Scatterpin, Renegade Sisters of Mary, rings me up. I'm spiritually goosed, as it were, from head to toe — which is a [...]
Remembering Anthony "Buddy" Anthos
As many times as we spoke I never knew his real name. I'm not sure I even knew him as Buddy. He never asked me my name. When we encountered each other it was casually, briefly, somewhat impersonally, at a bus stop, or while sitting at nearby tables [...]
Parting Glances: Sled-teams, celebs, P51s
It never fails. Long about July I'll have forgotten how bleak, brutal, backbiting February — short guy with 12 sibling rivals — can be. (Little wonder: by midsummer it's HTJ: "Hotter than July," in more ways than one.) Winter keeps me hibernating. [...]