Monthly Archives: February 2021

More Than 500,000

Over 500,000 Americans have died from Covid. My friends, Ro and Doctor Bertoni, were two of them. As was Dakota Pittman and many others. Last year this time I was atop Kilimanjaro. The 2021 team of Kili Initiative descended from the summit. I got an internet connection on the Saddle. Reports from the Guardian and […]

Pig Snout a la Thai

Several years ago my Thai cousin and I stopped by the Jomtien tha-lat. My sister-in-law ran a food stall inside the open-air market. On my last visit Yai had been selling chickens. Now it was pig and Khim said, “We eat from tail to nose. Everything, but the oink.” On display were heads, tails, feet, […]

THE TASTE OF PIG by Peter Nolan Smith

My great-grandaunt Bert circumnavigated the world on her father?s whaling ship in the 1870s. In 1960 National Geographic published a story about her childhood travels and at her 101st birthday the old Yankee lady related tales of seeing the black-toothed betel-nut chewers of Indonesia and joining tiger hunts on Java. The only two other family […]

Journal Entry – June 22, 1977 – Gaslight Pub – Park Slope

Last night the improv class at Hunter College was crazy, as Chuck, Carla, and I created another version of STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE about trannys. Carla went home with her ex-husband. I headed back to Brooklyn. No one from Manhattan wants to bridge or tunnel to that borough. At the Gaslight Pub the crowd was in […]

Journal Entry – June 21, 1977 – Park Slope – Brooklyn

Throughout the night David the super of Berkeley Place played Got to Give It Up (Part 1) by Marvin Gaye over and over again very loud. James rolled into the apartment at 8 and pounded on Hazel’s wall and the ceiling above his room. “Shut that shit off.” He put on a tape of the […]