Just look at that body language. Like an unfortunate couple that has been married two decades too long. Three rows back and three seats over, Gene Siskel has positioned himself far enough away from Roger Ebert that any communication between the two would require something just short of a shout.

He needs his fucking space.

It’s why bands break up, why marriages end, why siblings stop speaking to each other, why disgruntled employees steal a faulty printer from the office, take it to a field thirty miles from town, and proceed to trounce it to death. Ok, that’s a scene from Office Space, but you know it was based in reality. Someone really did that…

I recently went for a Tarot card reading. I didn’t know anything about Tarot until I read an essay written by a novelist who himself had learned to read Tarot. That same week, a friend of mine mentioned that she, too, reads Tarot. I found the serendipity too fun to pass up, and so I scheduled a reading. I was especially curious about the storytelling aspect of the cards as they are pulled from the deck, the stories that can be read by looking at the illustration of each card itself, and the stories that can be pieced together once the pulled cards are arranged on the table. I looked at the reading as an adventure in storytelling.

Letters are magical. The English poet Donne wrote, “More than kisses, letters mingle souls, for thus friends absent speak.” Letters open a window into lives in a manner that would never, in any other circumstance, be discovered in quite the same way. Letters have the power to change lives at the moment they are read and letters have the power to make history for the simple fact that, years later, they become history…

I’m not nosey, I’m a historian. And reading personal correspondence is the most fascinating part of history detective work. Do you know how many people burned their letters, either during their own lifetimes or under strict instruction after their deaths? The short answer is: alot, especially when those people were public figures…

…This was all very interesting, and I smiled with a mixture of curiosity and good old-fashioned star-gazing as I admired the Avalon’s groovy patio scene beneath the Southern California sunset. Hollywood’s golden age had not overlooked the Beverly-Carlton, and imagining that Lucy herself enjoyed a drink and a cigarette on this very same patio set off a string of I Love Lucy clips reeling through my mind.

“I love you. You are at liberty to make what use you please of this communication. Of course, I will love you after Thursday; but the point is that I love you now. “ - George Bernard Shaw

Once upon a time, there was a Holy Roman Emperor who was known as Charles the Bald. Charles was in fact only partly bald, and the irksome moniker only served to highlight the astute differences between himself and his namesake and grandfather, Charles I, King of the Franks, also known throughout the lands as Charlemagne: Charles the Great. To be frank, there was a shadow cast upon the reign of the grandson from Day 1. ..

“I cannot live without hens,” Nancy Luce wrote from her modest home on Martha’s Vineyard in the year 1865. The fact that Nancy Luce had to proclaim this in writing from the rural landscape of the Vineyard, an island six miles off the coast of Cape Cod, seems puzzling. Why should a lone woman, living amid meadows and farms and fields, feel the need to make such a proclamation? Who would begrudge an old woman her hens?…

She wrote of the books she was reading or would like to read but could not find at either the library or the local bookstore because the library and the bookstore did not possess the titles she was looking for. She wrote of the cats who shared her room, and the crowded and usually cold office nook she carved out of a small room behind the family’s kitchen, which could use a good cleaning. She wrote of using patterned stationery versus plain paper, and wondered if using patterned stationery made writers write better…