It boggles my mind how, in recent years at the University of Kansas, so many of the young women in my classes do not want to be identified as feminists. They seem to want all the benefits, and actually take all the benefits for granted, but would rather not be identified with the cause, or…
Now that BP has made Big Promises to make Big Payments (industry experts say the $20 billion in escrow will grow to $65 billion by the time this is all over), and now that BP has also provided some unintended comic relief by allowing Big People to laugh at the expense of “small people,” we all need to start filling up our…
Says President Obama to BP. Says the rabbit to the tree after Alice fell into Wonderland. Says American cheese to Swiss cheese. Says the flat tire to the garage mechanic. Says the IRS to all the loopy tax laws. Says the dike to the little Dutch boy. Says the wounded gunman to the Mafia medic.…
According to researchers at the Stockholm-based Karolinska Institute, creative people’s brains are similar to schizophrenics’ brains. Well, I’ve always known that. Yes, me too. Just so you know. Me two.
Although I emigrated to the United States in 1968, my mother did not come to visit me in Kansas until August of 1976, after she had already been in America for four months. The reason why she decided to make the long journey from the Philippines was because my play Conpersonas was being performed in…
Back in 1999, when one of my plays was in competition at the Edward Albee Theatre Conference at Prince William Sound Community College in Valdez, Alaska, site of the disastrous Exxon oil spill, there were lots of cocktail parties given by the oil companies for people attending the conference. Albee himself told us to be…
Today’s big headline news is that human beings mated with Neanderthals over 80,000 years ago. I don’t know why scientists are just discovering this now. Tennessee Williams explored such a relationship between Blanche and Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire, his 1947 Pulitzer Prize-winning play. And, of course, we also see such relationships being acted out…
Writing on Sarah Palin in Time magazine’s double-issue on The 100 Most Influential People In The World, conservative gun-toting sexagenarian rock guitarist Ted Nugent asserts that “the independent patriotic spirit, attitude and soul of our forefathers are alive and well in Sarah. In the way she lives, what she says and how she dedicates herself…
An article by Andrew Jacobs in The New York Times gives some wonderfully wacky illustrations of English as it is written and spoken today in China—e.g., the Dongda Anus Hospital for what should be the Dongda Proctology Hospital, restaurants offering “fried enema” instead of “fried sausage,” and signs in parks which urge visitors to treat grass humanely, with such admonisments…
How-to guru Karen Salmansohn has sold over a million books, among them How to Make Your Man Behave in 21 Days or Less Using the Secrets of Successful Dog Trainers. She might have gotten the idea from Strindberg’s play Miss Julie, wherein the haughty heroine treats one suitor like a dog by making him jump…