Kitten and I rescheduled our interview phone date. What a pair we made, I in my mincey, milquetoasted Dick Cavett-like voice and Kitten in her full-bodied 900-sexline voice…

In Metro Detroit, the night before Halloween is called Devil’s Night. Bad kids go around throwing toilet paper in the trees, egging people’s houses, or, in the neighborhoods of downtown Detroit City, burning houses down. On Halloween morning you always ventured outside nervously to investigate the aftermath. If your house was vandalized, you felt the [...]

His eyes grew wide and he smiled a crooked smile as my uncle poured me a glass of wine, still with no acknowledgment having taken place between us that we were related.

C still hung out with D for some time after graduation, though. They both lived in New York City. Even during college D had been an actor, and now he had just wrapped on a film! One that unbeknownst to anyone would soon catapult him to cult star status, and then eventually to star star status.

Everything my mom did and does for me is selfless, and priceless to me. This boxed museum of me has ended up being surprisingly, incalculably helpful to my career. It is a box-shaped embodiment of the quiet things a mother does to help her kids.

“If you lahk it, thaynk yooo. If you don’t, I don’t cayre.”

Out of the torrent of humiliation, hurt feelings, but mostly humiliation, the two rather pedestrian words “Fuck You” explode from my mouth like two different kinds of firecracker.

The usual judgmental thoughts ran through my head: Why take pictures of e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g? Why do you need to be in the picture with dumb, boring stuff? Just, simply, what is the point of this?

When I was about 7 years of age, I remember standing around in the school library with a couple of other children and Mr. Sorrentino, the librarian. She had just returned from an out-of-state librarians’ convention.

The only reason I remember the name Sorrentino is because of this anecdote. What happened next had a profound effect on me for life. I was never the same afterwards.

There was a man in there, the Bettwäscheaustauschmännle. Even though I was 20 and didn’t know anything about the world, I found it curious that they employed a man just to take in all the laundry. Why not just have people drop it off? I was about to find out.