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There you are, Teri Garr A dancer in a leotard, Keep the time, step on target, Frug with Elvis and Ann-Margret. Breathe the air, lift leg to bar. Fame so near, and yet so far. There you be, Teri G. With Sonny and Cher, on TV. Joe Namath at the laundromat. Freddie Prinze in a silly hat. Say your lines then step aside. Buy the ticket, take the ride. Acting lessons, anyone? Life is good, and life is fun. Who’s kis

  Jerry Herald had been the president of the company, but when our paths crossed his title was Vice President of Internal Corporate Communications and Blah Blah etc. etc. None of us knew exactly what Jerry Herald did all day, although he did seem to do a lot of it. He was always in the building, looking dapper in a three-piece business suit of a kind that no one else wore even in the 1990s. Rumor had it that Jer

With the encouragement and financing of my employer, the hospital, Twice a year I haul tail to a physicians’ convention. Usually I choose the thing for the gland and kidney crowd, Of which I am a member, but sometimes I’ll take in a Shindig for cardio or pulmonary or gerontology, Especially if it’s held someplace warm and fun, And with lots of direct flights. You’d think My husband would come

In the movie “Jaws”, Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider slice open a shark’s alimentary canal in search of human remains. They find a few fish, a tin can, a license plate from the state of Louisiana, but no undigested parts of people. Throughout the scene Richard Dreyfuss holds his nose and makes faces, conveying the idea that the shark’s insides stink to high heaven. The shark in this scene is

On a cold morning in January, in a year that most Fergus Fallsians had assumed lay only in the distant future, Mayor Mingalone sequestered himself in his sumptuous, mahogany-paneled office, where diligently he attempted to ignore the electronic sign blaring his city’s name through the window and instead to concentrate on the question at hand, which was whether or not to run for another four-year term. |||Fergus Falls

On the forgotten windowsill Glimpsing the heavens Through cloudy plastic Should only I bother To look up. We are saving pocket change For a new dishwasher Instead of repairing That old, broken-down thing. So for now I carry on dutifully With suds and towel At the sink. Once I danced And my heart beat proudly And I sang giddy tunes With my beloved in my arms As waves pounded the sandy beach In the moonlight. Shed no t

I met him at the book store in a long line at the checkout. He was talking about life and politics. I asked him a question that my mother had asked me, which she had heard on a quiz show, I think. “What was the first Beatles song,” I asked, “without the words I, me, mine, or you or your, or we or our, in the lyrics?” He thought for a moment, and then replied, “Eleanor Rigby,” which

During the cold winters we burn a lot of wood in the fireplace. One of my duties is to scoop the ashes and dump them into a hole in the far corner of the back yard. The other night I think of using the ashes to sculpt figurines, which even at the time I recognize to be a truly awful idea. Nevertheless I don old clothes and plastic gloves and my wife convinces me to wear a paper facemask, the kind used by painters to

I was standing in the park under that tree. I can tell you the park—it was Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, home of the Cardinals. And that tree was not a real tree—it was a billboard for the Missouri Federal Savings and Loan. The billboard was in the shape of a tree—they called it the Money Tree— and it hung just out of the outfielder’s reach over the center field wall. If a batted ball hit the Money Tree