By Laura Grimes
That headline was a perfectly innocent post on Facebook. How could I not? In the middle of the hot summer, after traveling long distances for two days, after having me all to himself for eons and then having to share me, after heat and humidity made sleeping tough, The Small Large Smelly Boy [...]
By Bob Hicks
Mr. Scatter doesn’t watch much television (especially since the Mariners have taken a dive into baseball’s primordial ooze of futility: where are you now, Edgar and Buhner and Big Unit?), and he doesn’t really go in for the American Idol model of determining cultural “winners.”
Shows like Idol and So You Think You Can [...]
In a town of gifted animators and graphic novelists and even the cartooning Simpsons daddy of ‘em all, Matt Groening, John Callahan has long held a special place: the edgiest of the edgy, the guy from way out there, the quadriplegic artist (we mention this because that fact is so important to the formation of [...]
By Laura Grimes
LEAVENWORTH, Wash. — “Is this a barbarian village?” the Small Large Smelly Boy piped up. “Do barbarians live here?”
He was jokingly referring to Leavenworth, Wash., the Bavarian village that screams for “quaint” to be added automatically to every reference. This is the place made for tourist buses and resorts.
I don’t consider myself a [...]
By Laura Grimes
The Small Large Smelly Boy and I have been on the road for a while, bravely negotiating a clogged highway along a lavender festival, fording a large body of water by ferry, climbing mountains, and gingerly making our way through Sasquatch Country.
JoJo can prove it. Our parenting thinking is so warped that we [...]
By Bob Hicks
The late lamented Charlie Snowden, Mr. Scatter’s boss at the old Oregon Journal (a newspaper that died when the industry was healthy), was a man who appreciated a good joke but also had unyielding standards.
At his perch on the news desk, Charlie was known to lightly mock certain passages of flowery writing as [...]
The coolest thing about the boffo reviews for the new Australian production of Long Day’s Journey into Night is that it gives Mr. Scatter the chance to type the word “boffo.”
Boffo. There it is. He loves that word. It makes him feel so, so … Variety-ish. As in, “Sticks Nix Hick Pix” (improved to the [...]
By Bob Hicks
“I didn’t do it!” the woman barked, pointing a long bony finger accusingly at another woman who stood in shell-shocked horror. “It was her!”
Not for the first time in his life Mr. Scatter felt a mild urge to strangle someone he’d never actually met. In moments of crisis the scramble for self-preservation is [...]
By Bob Hicks
Let’s hear a great big round of applause for failure, art’s best friend.
Mr. Scatter got back to Puddletown just in time to take in Sunday night’s final performance of Conduit’s four-night 15th anniversary benefit celebration, for which he’d been asked to give a little halftime talk with drummer/writer/arts instigator and general man-about-town Tim [...]
By Bob Hicks
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — “Guys, guys, gimme a break, will ya, please? Just pipe down a little bit. Other people are complaining about the noise.”
The guard at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, a tall friendly fellow in his 30s, is smiling a little sheepishly. But he has a job to do.
The objects [...]