NASHVILLE, TN -

I was single and in my early 20s when the film The Bridges of Madison County came out. I never got into Robert James Waller’s book, but I enjoyed the movie. At the time I worked in an office with mostly married women, and debating the movie became the water cooler topic du jour.

My married women colleagues argued that Francesca, Meryl Streep’s character, was right to stay in the truck with her longtime vanilla husband rather than flee into the passionate arms of new lover Robert Kincaid (Clint Eastwood) at the traffic light in the film’s devastating climax. I, however, vehemently disagreed. I argued that Francesca was a fool not to follow her heart. Not just a fool, but an idiot. “Why stay in a passionless humdrum marriage of convenience,” I said, “when she has been thunderstruck by her soulmate?”

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NASHVILLE, TN -

I was waiting for him to come home. I didn’t know his name, but he lived next door to me in 3B. I hated him.

It wasn’t an uncommon thing to have a bad neighbor in a city like New York. If you were a poor student like me living in the pre-yuppified East Village in the early 90s, you considered yourself lucky if you weren’t stabbed or pissed on from the apartment to the corner deli. So, if you were living next to a serial killer, you just learned to look the other way. I didn’t care whose severed head was in the refrigerator as long as it wasn’t mine.

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NASHVILLE, TN -

The new TV show Glee made its season premiere last week, and it seems like a good chunk of America is already hooked. I know I am. It’s a fun show that takes me back to when I was in Glee Club during high school. I loved being in Glee Club. I was thoroughly involved and was even Vice President during my senior year. Just to be clear, however, my high school Glee Club was nothing like the one depicted on Fox.

Granted, I was in Glee Club during the late 80s. Maybe things have changed since then. A lot. But in my day (and if you find yourself beginning sentences with “In my day” it’s a sure sign that you are about an inch away from yelling “You kids get off my lawn!”) our Glee Club was very proper. I went to a private all girls boarding school, which I realize could not have been a typical high school experience. We had curfews and couldn’t wear jeans to class or chew gum, we encouraged each other to excel academically, and it wasn’t nerdy to be in Glee Club. We didn’t have cheerleaders or a football team, you understand, so being involved in music was perfectly acceptable.

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NASHVILLE, TN -

“This is like CHRISTMAS for these guys!” said a random dude in the parking lot of the El Coyote restaurant in Los Angeles on that hot August night in 2006. It was the 37^th anniversary of the infamous Charles Manson/Helter Skelter murders in the hills high above L.A., and this guy was trying to explain to a handful of tourists why a large group of us had met up at that particular Mexican restaurant to commemorate the event. The El Coyote was the restaurant in which Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, and Voytek Frykowski had all eaten their last meal together on August 8, 1969 before returning to 10050 Cielo Drive to meet their gruesome fate later that night at the hands of Manson family members.

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NASHVILLE, TN -

I am a closet smoker. That means that after I look at people smoking on the street with disgust, vigorously waving their offensive carcinogenic cloud away with my hand until they either stub it out or tell me to go fuck myself, I sneak around the corner and light up. Why do I do this? Why do I scowl at those souls honest enough to light up in public and then turn into a hypocrite?

I grew up in a house with two chain smokers for parents who felt persecuted by the world whenever they encountered an environment that did not allow them to light up. Whenever they visited me in New York, inevitably they would wail, “Oh WHY is the world persecuting us?! Isn’t there ANYWHERE we can smoke?!! God, how we hate this commie town!”

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