Elvis 11 Times

My mom was washing dishes and I was drying them when we heard the news on TV that Elvis died - August 18, 1977. Like the day President Kennedy was assassinated, you always remember where you were and what you were doing the day the King left the throne. (Actually, he had fallen off the toilet, but you get my…

Continue ReadingElvis 11 Times

The Freshwoman

If someone had told me back in 1977 that young men barely past their Clearasil years would be saying “What’s your major” to me at age 40, I‘d have said “No way!” Well..."way!” It was all part of my experience as a student at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, where I took some non-credit courses in the summer of 2000. Here's what I wrote at the end of my first day of classes.

Continue ReadingThe Freshwoman

Confessions of a Font Addict

Die Nasty. Dream Orphans. Beat My Guest. Highway to Heck. No, these aren’t names of punk rock groups or titles of angst-ridden, teen-penned poems. They’re names of fonts. Four evocatively named fonts that co-exist among the hundreds of others in my Mac. Fonts that compete on a daily basis to be chosen for use in one of my literary or graphic masterpieces (ahem). I’ve rarely met a font I didn’t fall in love with. I’ve cruised the Internet super highways by night, luring new fonts to my harem. I’ve risked system contamination, blindly downloading free fonts from fly-by-night sites with seedy names like FontLust.com. Rogue fonts now reside alongside legitimate fonts that automatically enter the neighborhood every time I install new publishing software. Ah, but this indiscriminate font love now poses a major digital dilemma: I simply have more fonts than I can fathom.

Continue ReadingConfessions of a Font Addict