#117: America’s New Nuclear-Powered Hero

The following evening, Mama, Alice Too, Clarissa Too, and I all sat at a table in the Union Stripe Tavern watching the election returns on the TV above the bar. My Counterpart was not wearing her Ms. Megaton Man uniform, of course. Instead, she wore an Orchard Lake University sweatshirt and jeans and sneakers Mama went and bought for her. And she and Alice Too appeared virtually indistinguishable, since Mama had been working out so much; she looked like she was ready to fight crime as the Mod Puma, too.

#113: October Surprise in November

The first Sunday morning in November started off rather typically for me: playing the clarinet for the nearly-secular First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City church service. Our dysfunctional music ensemble was led by a long, grey-haired college-dropout organist—really a oboist and English horn player who never practiced the keyboard much during the week—who doubled as our insufferably snobby music director, choosing which hymns to butcher by cleaving out verses that didn’t meet his musical taste; a half-deaf brass player who doubled on electric bass and ukulele; a deeply manic-depressive older lady who played flutes, xylophone, and glockenspiel but always forgot her glasses, music, or the correct instrument she had intended to bring and always arrived in the sanctuary in a state of flustered meltdown; and her codependent husband, a guitarist and flugelhorn player who was forever offering to run home and retrieve his frantic wife’s glasses, music, or alto flute or whatever.