Pop culture in the mid-20th century included Playboy magazine, the one men claimed they bought to read the articles, not to “appreciate” the model spreadeagled in the centerfold. Published by Hugh Hefner, the rag doubled-down on an image of women’s role that the Second Wave of feminism of the 1970s and 1980s labored to correct. Hefner’s successful print empire expanded into major cities with Playboy Clubs, styled not as brothels but as extensions of Hef’s fabled and desirable rumpus room.

This 1959 video here was recorded in that very place during one of Hef’s legendary star-studded parties. An assemblage of…

I crafted this fiction for a contest in 2018. The assignment was to pick one of a pair of opening and closing lines from a published author, and write a different story in between. Of the four authors available, I picked Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man (1932). I didn’t win, but here’s the story for you to judge.

I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty Second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over…

Prologue

In 1975, as a twenty-something administrative assistant at a research arm of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, I joined three other MIT employees to start a newspaper for women called Sojourner. The chief editor, Allison Platt, received exclusive credit for founding the rag. But guess what? Sojourner would have gone nowhere without the fingers of the woman who set type for the first 120 monthly issues of the eventually 30-year-old paper.

The 1970s were a golden age, the “Second Wave of Feminism,” in the Boston/Cambridge metro area. I wrote and published articles, poetry, book and music reviews in…

My New York-JFK to Boston Logan-BOS airport connecting flight was delayed from its originally scheduled departure at 3:12 PM (arrival 4:40 PM). The plane actually departed at 10:52 PM and arrived at 11:36 PM. This excessive 6:56-hour delay was officially calculated by Dubious Airlines. Their note apologized sincerely for my inconvenience, while adding hundreds of travel points to my account. Inconvenience? they didn’t know the half of it.

This ordeal began at Gate B10, where we waiting passengers could see the darkened plane parked well short of the gate. Our agent confirmed a first takeoff delay of one hour, promising…