The King of Halloween and Miss Firecracker Queen by Lori Leachman
I experienced all of these things at my father’s funeral in 2012. These revelations brought new context to my entire life. The King of Halloween and Miss Firecracker Queen is my effort to synthesize what I thought was true about my life and what I learned was true about my life, my parents, and their love story.
My father was the typical small town football star whose ticket out of Cartersville, Georgia was a football scholarship. My mother was a debutant wanna-be with captivating looks and a sense of herself. They met in the fall of 1956 at the Fall Football Banquet […]
Society is becoming woke to the decades, centuries – millennia – that women have endured as silent victims of a predatory culture. This is a good thing.
The cold shower is the romance novel male equivalent of the internal hymen: you see it in books so frequently that you probably don’t notice it anymore, but when you stop to think about it, something’s off. In fact, everything is off. The cold shower, it seems, is just as grounded in reality as the mythical internal hymen.
My having an October birthday has meant many, many Halloween themed parties over the years. Then my youngest daughter came into the world on October 30 and we had two in the family born close to that veil between the living world and the dead. I was actually finishing costumes for my two oldest children when I went into labor. When each of my children were old enough, I made costumes and drove my kids to other neighborhoods or attended church events on Halloween. Unfortunately, the neighborhood we lived in for nearly twenty years was not conducive to trick-or-treaters and in all of those years we had exactly three trick-or-treaters…TOTAL. 