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Steinem, World Traveler on Behalf of Women

12/23/2015

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A WRITER'S WIT
When I’m writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.
Donna Tartt
Born December 23, 1963

My Book World

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Steinem, Gloria. My Life on the Road. New York: Random, 2015.

In 1972, when I’m a graduate student at Southern Methodist University, I attend an event in which Gloria Steinem speaks to the student body. Her address, along with an inter-term class entitled Women in the Church and Society, converts me almost overnight from a chauvinistic twenty-three-year-old seminarian, who can’t lift a finger to help out his working wife, to a young man who begins to mend his ways. The month-long class precipitates a metamorphosis that ends in my coming out as a gay man and deciding the Church will not be a very felicitous place for me to work for the rest of my life. Feminism saves my life. The same philosophy that frees millions of women from sex roles also frees men from those roles passed on to them by their fathers, whether they want to be like their fathers or not.
 
Steinem begins with a dedication that is more like a confession. She thanks, posthumously, the British doctor, who performs an abortion for her twenty-two-year-old personage. She promises not to tell anyone about the procedure but also promises to do what she wants with her life. She says, “I’ve done the best I could with my life. This book is for you.”
 
Almost immediately, Steinem leaves England for India, where she spends two years helping women to organize. But first she takes the reader back to her childhood in Toledo, Ohio. Because she attends Smith College, I always assume she’s had a rather privileged childhood. Not so. Her father is an itinerant antique dealer, who packs up his family in a car every summer to search for treasures and adventures. Her mother, however, suffers from depression, more than likely for having never achieved the things that she would have liked, asserts the author.
 
Steinem’s travels include work as a journalist in the 1960s; her most famous article may be one in which she is hired as a Playboy Bunny and writes a scathing exposé of the Bunnies’ working conditions. She establishes Ms. magazine. She helps to put together the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston and extends her travels to help Native women organize on their reservations—places where largely non-tribal men rape females with impunity. She develops lifelong relationships from coast to coast and around the world. This tome treats women’s issues with wisdom, humor, and a devotion that is unmatched. Like her five previous books, this one should be read by men and women alike. Steinem is a national treasure because of her courage and devotion to improving the lives of women everywhere, and we should never forget it.

Some golden nuggets from Ms. Steinem’s book:

“I could see that, because the Gandhians listened, they were listened to. Because they depended on generosity, they created generosity. Because they walked a nonviolent path, they made one seem possible. This was the practical organizing wisdom they taught me:
 
            If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them.
            If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live.
            If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye” (37).

“We might have known sooner that the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself—or will use military violence against another country—is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it’s violence against females” (43).
“If someone called me a lesbian—in those days all single feminists were assumed to be lesbians—I learned to say, “Thank you.” It disclosed nothing, confused the accuser, conveyed solidarity with women who were lesbians, and made the audience laugh” (51).
“When I was campaigning on the road and meeting with Republican or independent women, what I tried to say was: You didn’t leave your party. Your party left you. Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality” (47).
Speaking of early-day airline requirements for female flight attendants: “. . . their appearance was prescribed down to age, height, weight (which was governed by regular weigh-ins), hairstyle, makeup (including a single shade of lipstick), skirt length, and other physical requirements that excluded such things as a 'broad nose'—only one of many racist reasons why stewardesses were overwhelmingly white” (89-90).
“A journey—whether it’s to the corner grocery or through life—is supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end, right? Well, the road is not like that at all. It’s the very illogic and the juxtaposed differences of the road—combined with our search for meaning—that make travel so addictive” (179).
Or perhaps this sounds familiar: “The name of the Vatican body investigating the nuns is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the same body that conducted the Inquisition, which came to be known as the Holocaust of Women because as many as eight million women healers and leaders of pre-Christian Europe were killed by torture and burning at the stake over more that five hundred years. Chief among their sins was passing on the knowledge of herbs and abortifacients that allowed women to decide whether and when to give birth” (208).
On the Church’s complicity with slavery: “From 1492 to the end of the Indian Wars, an estimated fifteen million people were killed. A papal bull had instructed Christians to conquer non-Christian countries and either kill all occupants or ‘reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.’ From Africa to the Americas, slavery and genocide were blessed by the church, and riches from the so-called New World shored up the papacy and European monarchs. Whether out of guilt or a justifying belief that the original occupants were not fully human, history was replaced by the myth of almost uninhabited lands” (215).
Quoting Wilma Mankiller, tribal leader: “Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it—and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That’s why Native people were guarding it” (239).
NEXT TIME: My Annual Analysis of The New Yorker Fiction 2015
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New Yorker Fiction 2015

12/21/2015

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A WRITER'S WIT
The Nazi period could have happened only in Germany because the German education of obedience to any law and order was the main problem.
Heinrich Böll
Born December 21, 1917

Nocturnal Omissions

PicturePillsbury | deWilde
December 21 & 28, 2015, Tim Parks, “Bedtimes”: Thomas and Mary, married with two teens, seem to avoid going to bed at the same time. ¶ The habit is indicative of a deeper rift in their lives. Mary reads many books about dogs, which she finds “fascinating” and Thomas, excessive. His “work” (laptop) appears to be more important than connecting with Mary—though Thomas does find plenty of time to share joviality with his children. Both adults have arrived at a certain intractability, which is dangerous for any marriage. The third-person omniscient point of view works well at the end as Thomas wonders if he should remain awake until his wife returns from one last “pee” for the dog, Mary cries into her pillow, and their two children wonder if they can do anything so save their parents’ marriage while watching TV in a stone-cold playroom. Parks’s latest book, out last May, is Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books.
Photograph by Matthew Pillsbury.
Design by Barbara deWilde
UNTIL NEXT TIME: May each of my readers have . . . oh, to hell with it, Merry Christmas to All, and to All a Good Bawl!


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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Date of Original Post
:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

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New Yorker Fiction 2015

12/12/2015

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A WRITER'S WIT
Life would be a lot easier if conversations were rewindable and erasable, like videos. Or if you could instruct people to disregard what you just said, like in a courtroom.
Sophie Kinsella
Born December 12, 1969

Phone Sex for Real

PicturePrager | Blair
December 14, 2015, Dana Spiotta, “Jelly and Jack”: In 1985 Syracuse, forty-one-year-old Jelly calls important, creative men by phone and induces them to fall in love with her. ¶ This narrative takes place in a time when people may have enjoyed speaking on the phone . . . enjoyed rampant paid phone sex, which is where one thinks this story is beginning. Yet it is one of those rare ones that seems to s-t-r-e-t-c-h time, unrolling second by delicious second:

"And it worked like this: you found the words—out of a million possible words—that truly described the experience. That part, the search for the right language, was fun, almost like solving a puzzle. You thought of the word, and then you felt it in your mouth, pushed breath into it, and said it out loud. The sound of it contained the meaning—she had to hear the words to know if she had it right. Then, as it hung there, she revised it, re-attacked it, applied more words to it" (72).
Jelly takes great pains to make herself sound seductive, younger than her years, and lures men into falling in love with her—in spite of her “jelly doughnut,” stretch-mark laden body, which they never see.
"She would not call anytime. She would call on Sunday, at the same time. Only Sunday, and it would only be her calling him. Parameters. Predictability. That was the way it would work best for both of them, for this thing they were building between them" (72).
Each time the relationship reaches a certain point—a man wishes to see her photograph or meet her in person—Jelly breaks it off. With Jack, a film score composer living in Los Angeles, the situation plays out differently. She seems actually to fall for him. As with previous phone partners, to extend their time a bit, she sends Jack a photograph of a young, lithe friend, a mother of one of her blind clients, whom Jelly works with in real life, having nearly lost her own sight years before.
"It was the first time she’d understood what the phone could be—a weapon of intimacy" ( 76).
Spiotta’s book, Innocents and Others: A Novel, comes out in March 2016.
Photograph, Alex Prager
Design, Kelly Blair

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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Date of Original Post
:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

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New Yorker Fiction 2015

12/5/2015

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A WRITER'S WIT
The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.
Calvin Trillin
Born December 5, 1935

History We Should Repeat

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December 7, 2015, Martin Amis, “Oktober”: The narrator, a character much like his own author, ends a reading tour in Munich, in October 2015, as Syrian refugees pour into Europe and are officially welcomed by the Germans. ¶  Sometimes there exists a serendipitous coincidence with regard to one’s reading. Earlier this week I posted a profile of Christopher Isherwood’s 1935 The Berlin Stories, in which he, too, creates a character much like himself, who must see how a city can be shaped by millions of refugees, at that time, Russians. In this narrative, Amis braids together several strands: another Englishman who speaks rather rudely on his cell phone (turns out to be the man’s mother, who has lost her house in a fire); a hotel lobby pianist providing sort of a soundtrack by way of Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody”; different generations of refugees fleeing oppression to find freedom, including Vladimir Nabokov, who flees Russia, Germany, and France in the 1930s. Of the Syrian wave the narrator notes: “Theirs was a journey with charts and graphs and updates (those cell phones) but with no destination" (67).
 
And why do the Germans feel compelled at this time to give safe harbor to the Syrians (an answer I’ve yet to see America media explore, if in actual fact they know)?

“In the period from 1945 to ’47, there were ten million homeless supplicants on the periphery of what was once the Reich, all of them deported (in spasms of greater or lesser violence, with at least half a million deaths en route) from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania. And they were all Germans" (67).
Amazing. In this very Isherwoodian story, the narrator’s Iranian-German friend asserts:
“Bernhardt said, 'You know, they won’t stop coming. They pay large sums of money to risk their lives crossing the sea and then they walk across Europe. They walk across Europe. A few policemen and a stretch of barbed wire can’t keep them out. And there are millions more where they came from. This is going to go on for years. And they won’t stop coming'” (65).
In the end, the narrator, like Amis, with more ease than one would think possible, returns to his home in Brooklyn, New York, where he has lived less than a decade, as an immigrant. This story may tell us more about so-called immigrants than we’ve heard from so-called experts, and the author has written, polished, and published it in a major magazine less than two months after observing it! Kudos to Amis on all counts. His most recent book, Money: A Suicide Note, came out in 2010.
Illustration, Golden Cosmos

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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Date of Original Post:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

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Old Berlin

12/3/2015

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A WRITER'S WIT
[The family] is society's first teething ring, man's proving ground. When repudiated, it still leaves its strengthening mark. When it does the rejecting, the outcast is damaged. Within its confines, devils and angels rage together, emotions creep underfoot like wet rot, or flourish like Russian ivy. It is the world in microcosm, the nursery of tyrants, the no man's land of suffering, a place and a time, a rehearsal for silent parlour murder.
Elizabeth Berridge
Born December 3, 1919

My Book World

I'VE MADE IT MY GOAL to read the entire oeuvre of late British-American author, Christopher Isherwood, over a twelve-month period. This profile constitutes the fifth in a series of twenty.
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Isherwood, Christopher. The Berlin Stories. With a preface by Isherwood. New York: New Directions, (1935) 1954.
 
In Isherwood’s marvelous preface he delineates all the narratives that make up The Berlin Stories. Mr. Norris Changes Trains (known as The Last of Mr. Norris in America) comes out in 1935. Sally Bowles, a slim piece, is published in 1937. Berlin Diaries: Autumn 1930, The Nowaks, and The Landauers are issued by John Lehmann’s New Writing. Last in the book is A Berlin Diary (Winter 1932-3), in which Isherwood once again becomes Herr Issyvoo. Characters like Fraulein Schroeder reappear, as Isherwood realizes the cataclysm that is about to engulf Germany and takes his leave. Appearing in this order, these narratives comprise The Berlin Stories.
 
What are they, otherwise? Isherwood’s stories of early 1930s pre-Nazi Berlin may provide one of the most realistic views of Germany before it is changed forever by World War II. A sort of free-and-easy gay demimonde exists alongside laws that, for the moment, rather ignore squalid but important bars and restaurants, not to mention thugs of all kinds, as well as artists and writers living and observing the colorful life of the city. Isherwood himself says in his preface:
 
“From 1929 to 1933,  [age 25-29] I lived almost continuously in Berlin, with only occasional visits to other parts of Germany and to England. Already, during that time, I had made up my mind that I would one day write about the people I’d met and the experiences I was having. So I kept a detailed diary, which in due course provided raw material for all my Berlin stories” (v). Isherwood later throws out these diaries, making these stories his diary. Much later, he regrets that he had acted so rashly.
 
This may be the third time I’ve read The Berlin Stories. The first reading, in 1987, after I buy my copy at the old Taylor’s Book Store in Dallas, I am thirty-nine, having just finished my MA in English. The gay novel, as it is understood, is making quite a bit of noise, and to read Isherwood’s work, comparatively, makes it seem more of a whisper. Yet, for its era, his work is an act of courage. Like many of the characters in the book, he could disappear at any time, removed by the SA (Sturmabteilung). About my second reading I can only recall that I read it to feed my soul. This, the third time, however, I’ve kept my pencil in hand, used Google Translator to get at the German phrasing, tried my damnedest to get a feel for what Isherwood is doing. I’m not sure I succeed after all. Reading The Berlin Stories is more of an existential experience. It’s difficult to subject to analysis.
 
I believe that writers, particularly if young, should always keep a diary. All of these narratives that fit together so beautifully, are freshly harvested from the pages of Isherwood’s diaries: an irascible landlady, Fraulein Schroeder; Otto Nowak, Bernhard Landauer, Sally Bowles. The lives of these flesh-like characters are what readers must concentrate on, allowing their essences to wash over them, so as to enhance their own humanity. When we see similar behaviors in our own people we won’t be tempted to fall asleep as the Germans do at this time. Had they known what was to come, what Isherwood so clearly sensed, they surely would not have allowed it to happen. BTW: if these narratives sound familiar it is because they eventually become the basis of the stage show and later the acclaimed film, Cabaret.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2015


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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Date of Original Post:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

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New Yorker Fiction 2015

12/1/2015

 
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Observing
WORLD AIDS DAY

It is bad enough that people are dying of AIDS, but no one should die of ignorance. 
Elizabeth Taylor

a Home for Pelicans?

PictureBrian Rea
November 30, 2015, Rachel Kushner, “Fifty-Seven”: A homeless man with a certain strength remaining, who is released from the Los Angeles county jail, kills a young woman, and later, because he murders a prison official, is transferred to Pelican Bay State Prison. ¶ This story explores the life of a criminal, from the time, as a child, he loses his father and mother and an aunt, to when he flees the California school system and carves out a life on the streets, to the irony of his final trial when, in the course of the proceedings, his attorney determines that because of a clerical error the prisoner’s original I.Q. of 57 receives a “1” in front of it. If he is deemed smart he would receive death, but because he can’t possibly know what he is doing, he is given life—such as it is—in a maximum security prison. In a narrative filled with compelling imagery, perhaps the spit hood, made of a black mesh you can see out of but through which no one can see in, is a persuasive metaphor for this nameless wretch of a man’s life and the millions of others held by our nation’s prisons. Kushner’s most recent book, The Flamethrowers, came out in 2014.
Brian Rea, Illustration.

NEXT TIME: My Book World, Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories


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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Date of Original Post:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

    AUTHOR
    Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

    See my profile at Author Central:
    http://amazon.com/author/rjespers


    Richard Jespers's books on Goodreads
    My Long-Playing Records My Long-Playing Records
    ratings: 1 (avg rating 5.00)


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