Joyfully Retired

I’m on the stage singing the blues and jazz as well as acting. I’m also on Broadway and in movies. I’m a part of the great Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s and ’30s but my career stretched way beyond that period.
I’m reading His Eye Is On The Sparrow by Ethel Waters for this month’s Classics [...]

I’m in Boston hanging out with Charlotte McNally, an award-winning investigative TV journalist. She’s under pressure to come up with a blockbuster story for the upcoming “sweeps” at the TV station. Charlie suspects there is something strange and dangerous behind a series of email spam, she’s been getting. But is there a good story there?
I’m [...]

The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the name of the Lord in vain and set fire to Fred Shoemaker’s old broken-down toolhouse.

Those sentences are from [...]

Uncle Fitz’ . . . views on war had not changed since he had taken to the mountains to escape the war with Mexico in the 1840s, and in fact they had deepened: never had the Fenns owned a single slave, and if the Southern states wanted to leave the Union, that was their business; [...]

I’m reading Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. It’s a book of subtle humor and extremely fun to read. I will be reviewing it tomorrow as part of the Classics Circuit. Here are a few sentences from the book:
“My age!” said Miss Matty, almost speaking crossly, for her, for she was usually gentle– “My age! Why, how [...]

I’m reading a screenplay titled The Big Sleep by William Faulkner. It was taken from a book by the same name by Raymond Chandler. It features the famous detective Phillip Marlowe, played by Humphrey Bogart. Screenplays are a new way of reading for me. Here’s a little clip:

MARLOWE
Look — you and I want to go [...]

The world is full of chocolate lovers and I have come to rely on three recipes to help those who invite them for dinner: flourless chocolate cake, steamed chocolate pudding and chocolate bread pudding, which when it bubbles over fills the house with what Mary McCarthy describes in The Groves of Academe as “a rich [...]